The Definition of an Android
by Laryna6
Summary: Is a being created in the form of a human through mastery of magic or science: a replica of the human body, a child of the human mind. Every good parent believes their children have infinite potential. Definition of a Reploid sidestories.
1. Continuous Creation

_It's probably best to read this either as it's posted or if Definition is already complete when you get here, after _The Definition of a Reploid_._

_This is a prequel/sidestory to Definition, that came about because as I write this the characters are heading into the final battle. I was going to alternate between action chapters and chapters explaining who these characters got here and who they are, not to mention pointing out the world around them and what they're fighting for, that their fight is worth it, but I've decided I don't want to slow down the action any more than necessary. There's a lot of stuff in Definition that's been hinted and still needs to be explained for the Jigsaw Puzzle Plot to be understandable, but there are also things like what happened to Alouette before the game that happened or didn't happen to her in this universe to make her who she is that need to be written for the sake of the character's arc, but aren't really relevant to the final boss fight. _

_So I'll use this to post chapters that clear up dangling plot threads or just establish this place, these people and their history. I also may post some alternate universe chapters: There's a conversation that I really wanted X and Copy-X to have that I just couldn't work into the fic, since X was too determined not to hang around the group and Copy-X has been kept too busy on the station for idle talk with a cyber-elf._

_The chapters will be posted as I write them: I may sort them into chronological order after I'm done writing them. _

_Yeah, young, less-angsty Arciel's getting the Girl Genius references. Heterodyning fits in quite well with AT physics._

* * *

><p>The first time Aurora touched him he burned her. He still felt sorry about that. She was just a child, even if she was made from the virus. She clearly wasn't maverick, not if she could tolerate the presence of Weil and Arciel without killing them. Not when she actively sought them out, wanted company and didn't care if they were human or reploid.<p>

Such a child.

Zero's daughter. The Elpis project. This world's hope. The dawn of a new age, just like X's awakening. And Zero's. He hoped it would be better for her, and the world.

Unlike the nightmares that had given her creators the knowledge that something like her was possible her light was bright, and pure. Yet the only thing that had ever tried to touch his mind like that, even though Aurora Elpis hadn't tried to tamper with it, was the virus. So he'd reacted.

She'd fled behind Arciel. Now she peeked out at him from behind mommy's leg.

No, she was nothing like the virus.

She was _adorable_.

X had to smile, as he knelt down and held out his hand. "I'm sorry, I didn't mean to hurt you. I was startled, and I reacted without thinking." There, it was better to put it that way than 'you startled me,' when she was this nervous. He didn't want her to think this was her fault. "Are you alright, Aurora?"

X heard Alia talking quietly to Weil, the two of them with their heads bent over the monitors. "He drew on his energy reserves for _something_…" It was very hard to make head or tail of X's systems, when he'd evolved so much in the capsule. He'd been in there so long that he'd disassembled and reassembled every part of his body a few times over, evolving based on the results of the simulations. Then he'd woken up. Real world experience, becoming a hunter, feeling the virus: his original plans weren't much help when it came to understanding X's body and what he could do.

Dr. Light had meant for him to become his own person, and that was what he had done. A little too well, he sometimes thought, although his father thought it was foolish to blame himself for the fact they couldn't find or copy what made him immune.

That was what Weil and Alia were trying to find now; what part of his systems was responding to Aurora? If they found activity in certain areas, that would at least tell them where to look.

"Come up here, Aurora," Arciel told her while Aurora was still trying to think of what to say, pointing towards the scanner.

"Yes, Mommy." It just took a single beam of light to signal Aurora to send the scanner her data: so much simpler than analyzing X or Zero. But then, these two knew how difficult to read the two of them were, and had deliberately tried to prevent that from happening with their creation.

"Same amount of energy drain." Alia sounded surprised and a little hopeful: something made sense!

Weil wasn't as excited, but Weil hadn't spent decades banging his head against X's compatibility problems. "Not quite, but that's within the error bounds, or the system itself might need additional energy to work." Even though X's systems had spent decades evolving to efficiently combat the virus.

"Why wasn't there a flash of light?" Alia wondered now, fidding with her headset as she thought. "The energy must have gone somewhere."

Arciel looked at them, brown eyes puzzled. "Cyberspace." Wasn't that obvious? Why was someone as experienced as Alia even asking that question? Had she observed something Arciel had missed that indicated otherwise?

X was a little relieved that Arciel thought that other people were as smart as she and Weil were, instead of realizing that her intelligence was so superior that even Alia was scrambling to keep up. Well, Arciel hadn't had much contact with people. Now that he thought about it, X doubted that she'd ever had a conversation with anyone whose IQ was under 150 or so. She knew she was intelligent: that was why she'd been born, what she was for, but X wondered how she'd react when she came to understand how different she was from the rest of the world.

Perhaps that was part of why Dr. Wily had come to hate humanity: perhaps he'd mistaken simple ignorance or inability to figure something 'obvious' out and act accordingly for malice too many times.

"Of course, the law of conservation of matter and energy doesn't really apply on this level," Arciel said with a half-shrug that made some of her brown hair fall in front of her white-coated shoulder. "Newtonian Physics, Einsteinian Physics, this. I'm thinking of calling it Harmonic Physics." Because letting it be Arcielian Physics was just too arrogant, and forget calling it after its probably true originator. "It's a little like String Theory, except actually observable. It's possible to do different things on different levels. Like how chemistry can't turn lead into gold, but a nuclear reaction can."

Aurora rose a few more feet above the floor while this was going on, back to what X thought was her normal altitude. People talking Science meant that things were normal. She was still staring at X, though.

"I wouldn't have risked this test if I hadn't proven that the energy wouldn't vent itself on the physical level, either as some form of radiation or as something similar to a matter-antimatter reaction." Alright, well, that wasn't reassuring to anyone except Aurora, who didn't understand what all those words meant in that combination. "I'm not Marie Curie." Arciel wasn't going to expose herself unknowingly to something potentially fatal, not when she'd been told not to let herself die, not when they needed a cure.

"The virus contains energy, is energy. Zero disposes of it by absorbing it. X seems to dispose of it by canceling it out," or that was what Weil thought. "The amount of energy it uses to try to alter him: that's how much X has to use to block the assault?" He pushed his hands together to demonstrate: if he didn't push as hard with one hand as the other, the hand with less force behind it would be pushed back.

"Unstoppable force and immovable object is just a frame-of-reference problem," Arciel said, nodding as thought that settled it. X, Alia and Weil all decided not to ask her to explain.

"So curing the mavericks would take as much energy as the virus used to alter their minds?"

"Energy and will." Arciel frowned, thinking. "But the virus does use a force multiplier… Uncracking an egg can only be done with reality alteration… We're going to need a lever. Aurora just can't channel enough power to do it the hard way. Also, while I do have an idea of where we could find that much energy, it's not safe to do it now, not when the virus would absorb some of whatever we drew on. So I'll need to incorporate finding a key point into the program."

"Destroying the virus is relatively easy, as long as we don't have to affect Zero," Weil translated.

Arciel interrupted him to add, "We won't have to specifically leave him out: he'll shield himself naturally. Not a problem." Unless you wanted Zero to be able to wake up before a hundred years had passed.

Weil didn't seem bothered by the interruption. It reminded X of how patient Dr. Cain had been with him. "Curing the mavericks is hard. It's anti-entropic, just for a start."

"The virus had to half-destroy their wills in order to break in, so at least that's something. There won't be as much initial resistance, the real trouble is restoring their wills… But can't they do that themselves, over time?" Arciel wondered, then nodded. "That'll save power. "

"What happens if they're cured and their will's damaged?" That sounded worrying to X.

"They'll have to figure out who they are," Arciel told him. "They have the programming, even if it's watered-down. It's not the infinite potential system, but I'm impressed with Dr. Light's ability to write self-configuration programs…" Suddenly, she slapped herself on the forehead, not hard but the sound started X. Hitting herself when she messed up, even when it was more shock than pain? Was that how they'd been disciplined, that she'd do that to herself, think that was how it was done? "I'm going off on tangents again," she said in a way that was probably meant to be an apology. Then, she blinked. "A long enough lever and a solid enough place to stand." Looking at X thoughtfully, she asked them to, "Try that again. Interfacing and analyzing." A smile slowly spread across her face, and X saw the resemblance to Zero somehow, even though there was no genetic relationship. Of course, there wasn't one between X and Dr. Light either, yet X still felt akin to him, that there was something in common there, beneath the skin.

"Okay, Mommy." Aurora crept forward obediently. X tried to calm his systems: what he'd perceived as an attack had put him on alert.

"Aurora, would you mind if I touched you? That way I'll know it's you the instant I reach you," or so X hoped.

She bobbed up and down a bit for a nod.

X reached out slowly, carefully, feeling the slight amount of heat Aurora gave off as well as light. Closer still, and he began to feel something like static electricity. Aurora was an energy being, but technically so was everyone else. It was the electrons of atoms repelling each other that made atoms and molecules seem solid. Aurora already could control what frequencies she emitted, or else she'd have been emitting cosmic radiation as well as heat and light. If she attained enough control, she could pass for a reploid someday, X was sure. Axl could, after all.

X could absorb power from sources other than the virus: if he couldn't, he wouldn't be able to use e-tanks and recharge, he'd be limited to what his reactor produced. If he could think of her as safe energy… Yes, that worked, although before his systems had tried to bite her, and now they saw her as something to consume, which wasn't much of an improvement. To let something that wasn't a part of him enter his systems without making it a part of him? His body's unwillingness to compromise its integrity like that was why it was so hard to make armors or replacement parts for him.

This was a child, he told himself. Just curious, just exploring. X wanted to understand her as well, this child of Zero. Zero was more than a reploid, more than an android: this was also an aspect of him, a part of his nature. So this was not something he could turn his back on or reject anymore than Zero was.

Zero was a danger, to X and to the world, but Zero was also the most important person to him. He couldn't fail him. Not because of simple fear.

"Oh?" Weil spotted something.

"Infinite Potential System," Arciel said in a sing-song way, making them almost a tune, bouncy and eager, conveying her excitement. "Let me see, let me see," she said, moving over to the console and leaning over Weil's shoulder.

"No unusual system activity detected," Alia said, disappointed. Where was the power X was drawing on _going_?

"Well, of course not. This is only looking at what's here." Damn, Arciel's expression said. "I was hoping he'd shift in that part while he was actively using it. Schrodinger's cat: it's not shifting while it's being looked at." How annoying.

Alia stared. "What?"

"That's why you get contradictory readings when you scan him," Arciel said, almost offhand. "When he takes his armor off in the lab or during peacetime, there's false skin underneath. But, after he fought Sigma during the fifth war, his torso was cut through, and there wasn't any false skin or padding at all, just machine parts. It's the same principle as the Weapon Copy system: if the weapon needs to spray oil, there'll be a supply of it in his buster, taking up space. Change it back, and there's a plasma barrel. It's troublesome to have two solid objects in the same space at the same time. So, he must put them elsewhere. They exist in potential, if you don't mind puns."

"So he's shapeshifting, like Axl?" They'd thought something like that was going on with his buster, although on a smaller scale, but throughout his body?

"Maybe I shouldn't have used the word shifting. It's not teleporting the parts in, either. Manifesting? That works. Manifesting different aspects or pieces of himself, his systems." Same thing. "All of it's simultaneously there, in potential. It's a matter of what he's evolved or decided to express. Plus what he understands." She shook her head. "Still not putting it the right way. I'll try this: he is who he decides to be. The virus works by changing what the fabric of reality says someone is. If X couldn't override that, he couldn't fight off the virus, see? But if he can overrule the changes the virus makes to reality when it comes to his own self, that means he has to possess the capability to override reality. At least his own reality."

"So I can do what Aurora does, even if it's limited to myself and my own body?" X said, and by classifying her as something, someone like him he was finally willing to trust himself to touch her.

"Infinite Potential System," she said, as though it was self-explanatory. "Of course, there are different sizes of infinites. Zero's is much larger than yours."

"I suppose that's to be expected," he said, because he really didn't mind and Zero's creator had done good work. As well as hateful, spiteful, evil work, but that wasn't all he'd done, and Arciel wasn't doomed to it.

X wouldn't let her be. The world did not need another Wily, and the two of them were so happy together. Looking at Weil was seeing his old friend again, young, healthy and in love. Not the desperate, starstruck kind of love, but a partnership. The two of them had been there for each other even when no one else was.

Perhaps now he was seeing himself and Zero, looking at them.

"That's because Zero is a many." Not just one person's potential, but the potential for a future, the potential to become someone that would change the world the virus had stolen from every reploid it took over. "All the mavericks have to be cured, even the dead ones, or they'll will the virus back into existence, if there's enough of them. That's how Sigma created the altered versions: he had enough mavericks backing him that he could use their combined wills."

"You're saying that Zero is…"

"Zero is the virus," Arciel told Alia, as though it was no big deal. As though she was saying that Zero was blond, some minor but relevant physical trait, instead of saying that he was a mindraping parasite that absorbed others into itself and used them as hosts. She shrugged, since Alia was still staring, trying to digest this. She'd known Zero was the source, but this? "That's why I said he'd need to be kept sealed away for about a century, to be on the safe side. During that time, he should be able to alter himself into who he decides to be, what he wants to be. So he'll end up something completely different. If he wanted to be the virus, he wouldn't have cut himself off from it. Kind of like severing someone's spinal cord. Not that I've done that," she added.

"No one said that you had," X said calmingly, cupping Aurora in his palm. "Are you alright?"

"I'm fine." He felt her press down into his hand a bit, shifting about experimentally. She didn't actually feel furry or soft to begin with, but the static feel reminded him of clothes out of the dryer, and small, affectionate living things really should be furry. She reminded him of the teddy bear one of the men on the dig that had found him with Dr. Cain gave X after he woke up. He wondered if it was her power or his own mind that changed things so that she felt the way she should. "You're pretty."

"Thank you?" Although he didn't think she meant the physical.

For some reason, she decided to dart back to Mommy after that. Did she realize she'd said something odd?

"Data, data, lots of lovely data, so many ideas, I'll have to think up a new story," Arciel sang.

"Aurora can focus better on putting force behind a program if there's a story in the annotations. Empathizing with the characters helps her feel the right emotions at the right times," Weil explained, aware that it wasn't scientific, but it really did work, like most things Arciel came up with.

She went on: "One immovable object plus one lever equals the capability to move an entire world. One person with integrity and the right tool can change it."

Calling Aurora a tool? X scolded himself. Arciel was just extending the metaphor. He shouldn't be so suspicious of her. It wasn't as though Zero was evil just because he was a Wilybot, so why should she be, even if they'd based her on what had to be Dr. Wily's DNA?

* * *

><p><em>Zero thinks of himself as a sword, a tool, and he fights for someone else's ideals, using their nobility and dreams as a reason to fight, to make the world a place they can come true, to change the world into what X and Ciel hoped for. It was X and the Mother Elf that cured the Maverick Virus: It was Zero and the Dark Elf that cured those changed by Weil and the Baby Elves. I think X had Zero do it both to try to prove to Zero that he could, and so Zero could have some time with his daughter. <em>

_In _Mega Man Gigamix, _Rock says that he didn't want to assume someone was evil just because they were a Wilybot._


	2. Family Trips

_Happy Birthday, Pardra!_

_This is a birthday giftfic for Pardra, who requested X with his kids. The first scene I started writing ended up not heading in that direction, but I'll include it because siblings. _

_Sharks have been around for a very, very long time. Of course the Jaws theme would survive._

* * *

><p>"<em>Hm-hm,"<em> she subvocalized to herself under the water's surface. "_Hm hm hm hmhmhm…"_

There wasn't really any chance of sneaking up on her sister like this, even underwater. They all had proximity sensors. Yes, Levi was swimming under the dock to approach where Harp sat, dangling her feet in the water as she read in order to lure any rogue mechanaloids that might remain in the area for a little target practice (and to prevent other people from getting ambushed), but since Harp was aware of the possibility that something might go for her boots, even the fraction of a second's warning as Levi came out from under the dock would be enough for Levi to get a dash boot charge to the face, or rather grabby hand. Levi had her own dash boots, but she was dragging a bit of dead weight

So she pulled herself up onto the dock next to her sister, sitting down and pulling up the net bag full of mechanaloids. They were supposed to leave the ones that didn't attack them alone, but Dad made them work for their allowance, and cutting down on the numbers of hostile mechanaloids and hauling them back for scrap was one of the more palatable ways to make quota.

They could always take a shift guarding the plants, but that was on dry land and sometimes nothing even attacked the experimental fields and greenhouses, and that was _boring. _Harp didn't mind – she was on duty right now – but Harp had her eyes in the sky, and she could be over there in thirty seconds if anything came out of the hills or the seismograph detected some burrowers, which wasn't much worse than when Fefnir patrolled on the ride chaser.

Harp glanced over at the catch. "Anything interesting?"

"I'm working my way outward," Leviathan said cheerfully. "No new types, but I'm spotting a few more Kelpies now." While sometimes an irregular one would be hostile, Kelpies were a new design of maintenance mechanaloids, as opposed to the various wild varieties that hunted each other for raw materials. If they could get a proper seaweed forest growing here, then she'd been promised that her father would buy her whatever fish she liked, even genemodded to survive outside their preferred temperatures.

It wasn't as thought there was an organic environment in the waters around ancient Japan, or what was left of the islands, to be damaged by invasive species.

For now they'd also have to be modded to resist chemicals and heavy metals, but with the augmented kelp in among the seaweed forests… It would be generations before humans could eat wild fish in any kind of quantity without dangerous heavy metal poisoning, but that wasn't a problem for Levi. She was a reploid: metals were good for her.

To be honest, though, she hadn't liked the fish she'd tried all that much. Fruit was _way _better.

"Hold my book," Harp told her, tossing it over lightly as she pulled her legs up under her, spread her wings and kick-dashed up to get a bit of a boost before taking off properly.

Levi drew in a worried breath, glad trajectory calculations let her catch the book by its sides instead of touching the pages. "_My gloves are wet!" _she sent.

"_I wouldn't read real paper next to the ocean_," Harp said back, with a little modulation of the signal that meant she was rolling her eyes as Levi's audios picked up the sound of a few buster shots. Harp circled back: no need to land with small fry like that.

"So, once we've finished making some pocket money," Leviathan said, after handing Harp her book back, "What do you think about heading to the mainland?"

"I should have brought a bookmark," Harp said to herself, but oh? "The mainland?" That was an odd way to put it.

"We don't _have _to teleport everywhere. I can swim, you can fly: as long as I stayed near the surface, we could back each other up." And of course they'd bring their support units for extra backup, if they were heading far from civilization and its missile launchers. Dad would insist. "If it gets too hairy, we can just teleport out of there." And if they ran into something _they _couldn't handle? The Sea of Japan had been charted, but by larger boats. They hadn't found any mechanaloids capable of posing a danger to a good team on a strong ship, but what would happen when smaller boats were allowed into the area? A lot of the mechanaloids evaluated whether or not to attack based on size.

"Have you asked Dad about this already?" Harp looked at her with disapproving pale green eyes. She'd run this by Dad before asking her about it?

"No, I haven't yet, but I _think _he'll say yes. He might want someone to come with us," but it might be someone from the Oceanography Institute with interesting experiences to talk about. Dad might not want them to be _too _challenged, infinite potential system or no infinite potential system, but he knew better than to stick them with _boring _babysitters. Especially when the two of them could just whistle up a little fog, a little electronic interference, and presto! …Dad would brutally murder them in simulations when they got home. Repeatedly. Then _after _that there'd be the live fire test, and he'd coach them through doing field repairs on themselves afterwards, until they understood even a fraction of how much he'd suffered, thinking they might be dead.

But still.

* * *

><p>The sky over the greenhouse was kind of bluish, having his gloves buried in the potting soil wasn't bad at all, even if the itty bitty plants they were putting in them were way more delicate than he'd like, and it just wasn't a <em>bad <em>day. It wasn't that he minded spending time with his dad. A sigh still passed his lips, a bit of steam wafting through the air.

"Are you upset that Harp and Levi ran off to the pier without asking you if you wanted to come?" X asked as he examined another sapling to see if it would hold up to being transplanted yet.

Fefnir sighed again, this time like a human. "I was just playing around." With his internal temperatures. It wasn't showing off that _he _could make clouds, and _he _could do stuff with water.

So why were they always going off and doing stuff together and leaving him out? He knew about their environmental systems: why hadn't Dad built _him_ with one? He was the only one without one of those things, and he was the only male model: hadn't Dad realized that he would be the odd one out?

He still hated being left out, all the time.

"To be fair to your sisters," X said, putting down the pot, "you spent all your time with Aurora when she was here."

"Well, yeah," Fefnir started to say, about to claim that was _totally different_, but then he realized that "I was doing the same thing to them that they do to me. Doing stuff and leaving them out." Showing off that he had a friend, and they were going to do cool stuff together, and they weren't going to play with Harp and Levi, so there.

It made it worse that they hadn't even noticed.

"They don't mean to leave you out," X said. Fefnir didn't turn, since he felt like even more of a newbuilt when he saw the gentle compassion in his father's eyes. "Your sisters are unique. The only two like them in the entire world, just like Aurora will be until the process is refined. I built them so that they would have each other. I'm sorry: I didn't realize that you would feel left out."

"They're _way _weirder than Aurora is," Fefnir said, even though that wasn't true at all. He just felt like Aurora needed sticking up for more than Harp and Levi did. Sure, Aurora had a sister now, but it was a human baby and it was going to be like a _decade _practically before it could stick up for anyone. That was just crazy. As bored and useless as he felt sometimes, and stupid because there was so much stuff he didn't know, when his sisters practically had a private language and his dad knew _everything_, it had to just suck to be a human child.

Not that telling himself that he didn't have it that bad and should stop grumping around about it made him anything but grumpier.

"Why don't we do something together?" Dad offered. "I was hoping that you'd make more friends among the people that are coming to work here, but family is family." Now that the fields and greenhouses were built, the pier and the hardened buildings. Once they cleared out more of the dangerous mechanaloids, this might even become a boom town. There were even going to be a lot of humans moving in, because this would be a new center of ecological reconstruction research and there were a lot of humans in that field.

Fefnir had hoped that Aurora's family might come, but MMHQ and the Cain Foundation headquarters nearby were the center of reploid research again, they way they were before the virus, so her parents were staying there. He wished she'd visit more often, but her parents didn't want her going out on her own too much. She'd get mobbed the way Dad did when they knew who he was.

"People are a little, well, they know I'm your kid," Fefnir said, feeling a little awkward and glancing over at the wall. It wasn't Dad's _fault _that people got weird around Fefnir, and he didn't want him to think that Fefnir blamed him for it, but it was the truth. "Phantom said I should try wearing a disguise, but that just doesn't seem right." To make friends when he was lying to them about who he was. "Doing something together sounds great," he said, kind of hurriedly to change the subject. He didn't want X to feel bad.

"Mmm, what about a trip?" X thought aloud, with a little contemplative note that told Fefnir that he'd noticed what Fefnir said about other people and was considering what to do about it. "Camping might be nice." They wouldn't get mobbed, except possibly by mechanaloids, so Fefnir might actually get to have some uninterrupted time with his Dad without having to handle squishy little things and worry about killing them. X also turned his communicator off during family time, but the other two were there then, and they were doing all that ecological reconstruction stuff that they could talk about with Dad and what did Fefnir have to talk about? He wasn't doing anything interesting, just saving up for a ride chaser and trying to figure out what the good options were.

Which mostly consisted of drowning in numbers and graphs of performance curves and his sisters giving him looks like this was _so _easy and should take like five seconds and what was he stupid until his dad reminded them that Fefnir was an ordinary person, not like those weirdos, and they should be nice.

That was just the problem, though. Fefnir was _ordinary_.

Except he wasn't, he found when he tried to talk to other people. He was his Dad's kid, and that meant he couldn't be ordinary, either. There wasn't anyone who was going to treat him like 'one of them,' even if his dad was probably thinking about some way to try to make them. Dad was old and knew a ton of stuff and even more people, but if his dad made friends _for _him, then that would still mean they weren't hanging out with Fefnir because they wanted to hang out with Fefnir. It wouldn't be the same as making friends on his own.

He let out another little huff of steam.

"If camping doesn't sound interesting, what about the races? Or we could go shopping for your ride chaser. Cain Labs has contacts with a lot of the manufacturers, for parts production and safety certification. It wouldn't be hard to arrange some tours and see who has the time to talk to us."

Fefnir perked up at that a little. It sounded cool to talk to the experts, even if they'd be doing it because his dad pulled some strings, instead of because they wanted to talk to some random newbuilt who was just learning about ride chasers. He could still learn a lot from it. "You don't have to," he said, because he knew his dad didn't like taking advantage of how many people would do anything for him. X could say it would be a business contact thing, but Fefnir knew by how that people would do it just because this was X asking for it.

"And your grandfather didn't need to take the time to build all those armor capsules, when he was getting old," X said, tapping a finger in his forearm. He didn't sound quite disapproving, but rather like there was something that Fefnir should know by now. "You're my son. It's always worth it to do things that will make you smile. Or help keep you safe." Like wearing armor around the house all the time, to set a good example, even though Axl kept exclaiming every time he came over that X was still wearing it, when he'd kept saying during the wars that he wanted someday to take it off, put it down. "If you ask for something and it's too much trouble, I'll tell you. If I'm offering you something, it's because I want to do it for you, if it will cheer you up."

It made Fefnir blush, looking way too much like the color of his armor, and duck his head. It wasn't like he didn't know he had the best dad in the world, everyone knew he did. It was just that his dad said things like this, and how was Fefnir supposed to pay it back?

"I try not to spoil you," X said, "but will you let me, every once in awhile?"

He stood there, just not knowing what to say, relieved that his father could read it in his face, relieved when blue arms wrapped around him.

It was embarrassing, and he wished feelings were easier to control, but he really did have the best dad.

* * *

><p><em>My X-muse is reflecting that being a parent again has turned him into Zero. It's one thing to walk around without armor himself. It's another to see his kids walking around unprotected, not matter how safe things currently are. Now that he's experienced war, anyway. <em>

_I like the idea of Fefnir being the most mechanically inclined, between his guns and the artillery focus of the Jin'en. Even if he lacks the natural aptitude for it Harp and Levi have, it's nice to think that in another universe there might have been a third generation of Drs. Light in the robotics field. _

_He's young now, so the focus is things that go fast, and later things that destroy things that are killing people once the war starts, but finding how engines are put together interesting, and how to make them work even better leads to understanding the theory and finding the entire thing fun… _

_But for now, as an android (human-like) he has the human problem of figuring out what he wants to do with his life. And doesn't realize that choice itself is the infinite potential that made his father so special to begin with. The potential that the virus stole from reploids for so long. _

_And then the war comes, and he too must put aside dreams for the future to become what the world needs, while X watches. _


	3. Too Merciless to Bear

It was illegal for a human to practice organic medicine in Neo Arcadia. Inorganic medicine, treating reploids, was fine, but humans could not treat the illnesses of other humans.

Health classes and preventative medicine were allowed, in fact they were compulsory. The vast majority of doctors that studied and operated on reploids were human, because since humans had all those latent years before they could really be put to work they should spend it studying _something_, but humans were not permitted to attend the school that taught the medicine of their own species. Everyone in Neo Arcadia had to work, hold a registered job and medical doctor or nurse were not allowable careers for humans.

Humans would not be licensed and treating patients without a license? The Zan'ei did not take kindly to snake oil salesmen. Swindling people desperate for a cure was a death penalty offense in the early days, just like hoarding food to extort money, possessions or other coin out of hungry citizens, and those the Zan'ei caught were often the lucky ones. The government made it quick: lynch mobs were generally in no mood to be merciful.

Very soon after the founding of Neo Arcadia X had gathered up every single surviving doctor, nurse, field medic: anyone who knew anything about human medicine other than the most basic field surgery. A good portion of the armies knew how to stitch someone up, after giving them alcohol and something to bite down on, because sometimes there weren't enough elves. And without them, humans were so _fragile_, and yet they fought anyway.

Most of them had died of that bravery.

Weil, like the mavericks before him, had targeted officers. Had targeted everyone competent, especially X and his children. Had killed every captured human over the age of thirty. Reploids weren't given the option of surrender: if they were overrun it was a matter of hoping it wasn't by a baby elf, who might need to replace whatever puppets she'd lost in the assault. Reploid bodies, mechanaloids, ride armors with rotting human bodies still in them: the baby elves were an effective terror weapon, and Weil knew it.

He also knew to kill the doctors and medics first.

In the aftermath, X knew that although he'd learned quite a lot about human medicine, when he had the chance, for the sake of keeping people alive, he wouldn't have the chance to teach anyone. Neo Arcadia was a hastily thrown-together shelter at the start. Too many people crammed too close together, water for washing in short supply and as for heating it! Maybe in five years, ten.

There were barely any people left, except X himself, who knew that those conditions were asking for plagues. When it was easy for disease to spread, there was no incentive for it to adapt to keep the host alive and somewhat healthy so that the host would spread the disease while going about their daily life. Hygiene bred nuisance diseases, but when they spread so easily that a host could get hit with three, six at the same time? One of them would kill him, so strains that relied on functioning carriers for transmission would be selected against. The evolutionary winners would be the ones that bred as fast as possible, exhausting the host's body in the process.

Killing them.

An environment like Neo Arcadia bred plagues. All the pre-industrial, pre-hygiene cities had been death sinks, with more humans dying there than being born. To make matters worse, thanks to Weil Neo Arcadia did not have a very large gene pool. More genetic diversity meant a wider variety of immune systems and strategies.

When a city with poor hygiene and low genetic diversity met a disease it was unprepared for? For over a century the human population had been relatively free from disease. It was the reploids that had to worry about that. In the beginning, the Maverick Hunters had studied how plagues operated in order to try to halt the spread of the maverick virus. That was why every Hunter had a single room, and all the halls and rooms in Headquarters had been large, so reploids weren't packed together.

That wasn't an option in Neo Arcadia. Larger rooms took more energy to heat and cool. Installing UV lights in the air ducts would help keep the environmental control system from spreading disease, but X would have to get the lights made, and schedule the installation by trained electricians…

X had a good knowledge of history before he even woke up: the ethical simulations Dr. Light set the capsule to generate had been based on reality since they were meant to prepare him for it.

Aside from the fact that they did have the germ theory of disease, and did know what would help, the best historical counterparts to Neo Arcadia were the city-states of Central and South America. When new diseases reached them, mostly traveling far faster than the explorers? The best estimate of the death toll was _nine out of ten _dead, over two continents. The inhabitants of the city-states had a slightly better survival rate, but that was because the cities had started to breed up stronger diseases, so their immune systems had been stronger than their more spread-out neighbors.

So in that respect, Neo Arcadia was worse off than those examples. For over a century, since the mavericks didn't think in terms of bioweapons targeted at humans, medical science and preventative measures like hand-washing had protected them from everything but nuisance diseases. The killer their immune systems constantly fought was cancer.

After the Cataclysm, much of Earth's surface had become at least lightly irradiated, as the fallout from blown fission plants and a few detonations spread. Nowhere near as much as a nuclear war would have caused, thank goodness. The survivors had gathered and rebuilt in the safer areas. Fortunately, the people of 20XX had decided to get rid of their excess nuclear weapons and waste. The original means of disposal had been a deposit on the far side of the moon. Fortunately for the people of 21XX, at some point after X had gone into hibernation they'd sent them into the sun in case of alien invasion, because it would be stupid to leave nukes somewhere an enemy could get to them and use them as kinetic weapons. X didn't know about aliens, but he was certainly glad they hadn't been there for the mavericks to get their hands on.

Still, for over a century humanity had been training and breeding immune systems to attack not outside invaders, but their own bodies. Most cancers didn't get very far before being identified and destroyed by the immune system. It was those that weren't detected by the immune system in time that killed. Allergies, overactive immune responses to relatively harmless substances, were already a problem. An immune system like that going after an invading virus or bacteria in the heart? Or, heaven forbid, the brain?

The children were the safest, despite their lack of diversity. Their immune systems were still learning and adapting: the more disease they were exposed to now, especially before those diseases evolved into killers, the safer they'd be. The adults?

Plague _would _come to Neo Arcadia, and it could finish what Weil had started.

The surviving doctors and nurses would die. They'd be flooded with patients, worked into exhaustion, and each mistake, each slip, could be fatal. It would only be a matter of time.

There were no surviving reploid doctors of medicine; unless one counted Childre's programmed knowledge of pediatrics, obstetrics and the unfortunately obvious. Most of his practice was with the latter two.

A reploid, train to treat humans, during the Maverick Wars? A few had decided to attend medical school after the end of the wars, for the sake of bridging the gap and learning about how humans operated, but that kind of forward-thinking, brave, inquisitive spirit? They were all dead. Oh, there were reploid combat medics, but they couldn't really diagnose anything but the obvious. 'Oh, there's your problem: your leg's been blown off.' Telling one disease from another without tests that took time, trained hands and expensive equipment?

Medicine was a craft: it required knowledge, instruction and experience. It took accumulation of data to make an expert, to look at a human body and see where something was wrong and what it was. Especially for reploids, who weren't used to seeing the human body in a mirror, who hadn't grown up with one and its quirks, parents telling them what was normal and what wasn't.

The children Weil had… caused generally didn't have parents, at least parents that wanted anything to do with them. A lot of nurses were needed, to keep alive those children that looked like both one of X's dearest lost friends and one of his most hated enemies. No one was going to like X assigning Childre to that, and he didn't quite like it himself, not this soon, but Childre was the only one with the knowledge, it needed doing, he could remind Phantom to keep an eye on him and only a fool would argue with 'Master X.' He did not have time for fools: there already weren't enough hours in the day.

The surviving doctors knew what to tell students to look for. Had memories, however dim, of their own school days and what techniques had been used to teach them. If their knowledge was lost, how long would it take for it to be rediscovered? For reploids to notice things and think to pass them on the way rudimentary trauma medicine had been passed around? How many would die before Neo Arcadia once again had competent medical practitioners?

X's solution was brutal, but it only tore at him for a moment. He was too numb. He'd been making too many of these decisions for decades now, and it felt like Neo Arcadia was being built out of them. Heated water or air circulation. Quick, cheap concrete to get everything out of the weather or walls that wouldn't blow down like they were made of straw in the first attack. Reploids with decent battery life or emergency backups for life support. Fields that could easily be destroyed, hydroponics, or a transition from one to the other? How rapid?

Everyone brought these choices to him, and he had to act, because the rainy season was closing in on them. The cold and wet would exhaust what reserves of stamina the humans had, as well as forcing them indoors.

So the field hospital that was one of the first things built was stripped of everyone who had learned medicine before the war, and every person they'd trained during it. They were put into a heavily defensible building, a few kilometers away from any other buildings and with the military barracks between them and the developing residential area, given two hundred newbuilt reploids and told to teach half of them to be doctors and half nurses, no matter how long it took. Oh, and they would not be allowed outside (except on the roof, for sunlight), until they had. Patients, samples and dead bodies would be brought to them.

It didn't take them long to figure it out, looking around at the other puzzled faces and seeing how few there were. No doctor had survived Weil without having very good survival instincts. Without others dying so they could live. The only complaint they would have made if they'd been able to question Master X was why newbuilts? Why not experienced reploids, who had done what they could to help people during the war and at least knew what a liver looked like? Why cheaply-constructed newbuilts with no armor or weapons? Not to mention barely any more servo motor strength than humans had arm and leg strength.

They figured that out when the White Plague hit, and they weren't allowed to leave, even to help the suffering. Especially to help the suffering. The weaker, untrained newbuilts, unlike armed veterans, couldn't be used to break out. Not past the units deployed to guard the building against those trying to break in.

X didn't even try to keep them from finding out what was happening outside. It was incentive to work quickly, after all. To wrack their brains for every technique that might help those brought to them, which could be passed on to those trying to help the patients lying in rows in the field hospital.

Reploids, unlike humans, couldn't get sick. Their bodies couldn't become carriers, and there were sterilization methods reploids could use that humans couldn't without, for example, burning all the skin off their hands. The risk of secondary infections was far smaller at a hospital with an all-reploid staff.

Training took time, and instructors. It took brainpower, which took energy. Why give those valuable classroom slots to people who were likely to be incapacitated or die just when they were needed most?

So reploids treated humans, and humans treated reploids, each species relying on the other to provide one's strengths and cover the other's weaknesses, and that thought might have made X happy, might have made him think that perhaps Elysium could rise from the ashes of a thrice-burned world, that the races could work together, if he wasn't thinking of all the people who would die before it reached that point. Because of the decision he'd made. Cursing him and this wretched place as their children, parents, lovers breathed their last, dying themselves as they attacked the guards.

At that point, he could still care about them. And they _prayed _to him, or some of them did. Even the ones who cursed him. Even _as _they cursed him, invoked his name.

Their savior. Oh, it had taken Zero in the end to bring victory, but X? It was X that had been there from the beginning, fought to hold Weil back, rescue them from his clutches. X was the one building this place of refuge. The Father of all Reploids, the root from which they had sprung. The Child of Light.

If he _ever _found out who was responsible for him being called 'Master' in a non-ironic way… He should fight that, he knew. They were _not _slaves. Weil had meant to reduce them to that, and he hadn't succeeded.

Right?

Weil had made, had truly made them believe beyond any doubt that there was a devil. Weil was truly, horribly real. There was no denying that. Didn't the existence of a devil imply the existence of God? Evil imply good?

X used to think that the existence of good didn't necessarily imply the existence of evil. He didn't know what he thought anymore.

That should have worried him more, but he had almost gone numb, and thinking was a painful pastime. There was too much to think about, all of it horrible.

Just… Let them believe in whatever gave them comfort. Let them believe in him, despite all the times he had failed. Let them do what they wanted, when Weil had tried to take that freedom away from them. There had been plenty of odd people since he woke up, like all that fuss about how X had been immaculately conceived (of), although really X doubted a human as old as Dr. Light had been a virgin. Not that he'd ever asked, of course.

Let them have their rituals, cut cloth too threadbare to warm them into ribbons if it made them happy. Religion was an opiate, and the world had just been through so much pain. If they could use this to make sense of it all, then X almost envied them.

Let them have what they needed to survive, no matter the cost, to X or anyone or anything else. For the sake of these children, so they wouldn't be cursed by the sins of their father, for the sake of this scarred world, he would give them anything he could.

But sometimes, to be generous now meant that later there would be no more to give. Clearly he knew that. Knew that people could be used up, just like anything else.

He just didn't apply that to himself.

* * *

><p><em>This is what happened the first time I tried to write the Alouette chapter, because it was right after I'd written the chapter where X explained that he was leaving with Zero &amp; I wanted to show some of why ruling Neo Arcadia, making the decisions necessary for survival while dealing with the broken ones and the consequences of the cold equations was what finally broke him after both the Maverick Wars and Weil. <em>

_It's one thing to fight people who are brainwashed and crazy. It's another to fight the evil/insane plus those who want to die. Even Repliforce legally deserved what happened to them, due to negligence, desertion in the face of the enemy and plain too dumb to life. _

_How does a father, and a son who was protected by his own father's love and gifts for so long, deal with having to kill those who are just trying to save their own children's lives? _


	4. Knows What Evil

_They have definite naming conventions in the Mega Man games. Well, theme names aren't a rare touch in Japanese media, but it helps when coming up with random names to be able to pick something that fits the theme/cultural setting, to avoid ruining the immersion. _

_In this case, I decided on Meadow because it's part of the name progression (Meadowlark), and it's probably a nice-sounding concept in Neo Arcadia. A lush, green land, which is how people picture Arcadia itself, actually. Soft grass to play on, etc._

* * *

><p>Whispers, human and not. It was easy for someone with a superior hearing system to tell the difference between sound produced by moving air over an organic mechanism and digitally generated sound coming from a speaker. Humans produced sounds that weren't in the frequency range they could hear, and reploid voice programs normally didn't bother to produce those.<p>

"Is she…" She wasn't sure if the reploid's voice faded out of hearing or if he'd left off speaking at that point, not to wake her or because he'd substituted a shrug or something for the rest of the words. Some of the older reploids used the human nonverbal shorthand, especially for dicey situations or awkward discussions. Fortunately, the humans knew better than to assume reploids spoke much of that language, and ignored it when reploids made gestures like folding their arms in front of their chest and clearly didn't know what they were saying.

That was a scary concept, wasn't it? Imagine people 'hearing' you say, 'I hate you and want to kill you,' when you hadn't meant to say that and didn't know they'd heard it.

For anyone, but especially her.

"Medically, she's fine," a human voice reassured him. "We'll need to keep her for observation… Unless you'd prefer something else?" The first part of that was spoken authoritatively, then the man had backpedaled, embarrassed, and the other half was apologetic willingness to be obedient.

"Shh," she heard next. Oh, so that was why the human's voice had been clearer: So the reploid _was _trying not to wake her.

The human was probably a mechanic, because he knew, "Don't worry; she's locked in sleep mode." Or so he thought, anyway.

What had happened?

Her recent memory data was foggy, but not the normal fog.

She'd been, yes, she'd been in Soliel's room. Soliel was a little bit bigger than her now, although in terms of total volume she was smaller. So thin.

Sometimes that just happened. Every human's DNA was gone over before they were born, looking for problems, but there were also the modifications, and human DNA was under attack all the time. If something went wrong? And they were so complicated. Her parents had gotten the doctors to look at her, but they didn't know what was wrong. What tests they'd been able to afford didn't reveal anything. There were things wrong with her, yes, new symptoms kept showing up, but the variety of types and locations of symptoms, multiple organ decay, indicated that the mostly explanation was a genetic failure somewhere, and those couldn't be helped without knowing what to target.

Her parents were both reploid engineers: they'd been able to pay for multiple doctor visits, and some tests, and they'd insisted on paying for Meadow's ration because she was such a help and Soliel liked her. Since Soliel was sick, she wasn't allowed around other children. What if it was contagious?

Meadow was a new-model crèche nurse reploid: Soliel's uncle had asked them to let her stay with them and interact with their daughter as a test. To learn about human children and how to look after them in a controlled setting, one on one, instead of being dumped in the crèche and being surrounded by them. The city had approved the experiment, but since she was still technically working for an individual instead of the city, someone other than the city had to pay her ration out of their own ration. They didn't pay for citizens to have servants.

It had been easy for the two of them to afford Meadow then, since scientists got a larger ration so they could use it to obtain what they needed for their experiments. Once Soliel had gotten ill, things had changed. At first she had been able to keep up with her coursework even working from home, but first she'd fallen behind and then started failing tests and not completing assignments. Since everyone had to work, and the work of human children was learning, Soliel had first been fined and then her ration had been cut off after a full month had passed since the last assignment was turned in. Her parents had used up their savings trying to find what was wrong with her, and now Soliel's share of the rent, water, electricity and everything was coming out of their rations. Not to mention the disease transmission fines.

For a human to stay around a sick person was exposing themselves and the people they interacted with to that sickness. If a human in the database was labeled sick, they couldn't cohabitate with another human for the duration without both of them paying a fine. That was why most humans had reploid roommates, that and the fact reploids couldn't eat food, so they were less likely to raid someone's emergency stash.

There was an area with very small rooms near the hospital for people to crash in while taking sick leave, but Soliel's parents hadn't wanted to leave her there and not visit her, even if Meadow could stay with her.

Since whatever Soliel had didn't seem contagious, the fine wasn't much, but since they didn't know what it is, that meant it could be contagious, so there was still a fine. Per day. It added up.

A lot of reploids thought humans had it easy, since they could get good rations without having to do the heavy lifting or dangerous stuff, unless they volunteered. Human children were born into training programs, while a reploid needed a good work record to even consider applying to one, unless they wanted to join the armies, and once you were in the armies, you didn't get to choose what you did at all.

They still had to work for that ration, and right now the poor girl's parents had to prove that they still deserved it. The ration they got was to fund their work, not their daughter, so if they didn't produce? The two of them hadn't been able to afford contracting some of the work out to other people for over three weeks now, so they were putting in extra hours and were barely ever home. They'd let Palette's maker take over paying her ration a month before that, and he was helping them with their work, too.

Meadow wasn't supposed to tell Soliel things like that, but Soliel had asked. They couldn't keep this up for very much longer. If it came before the city, Soliel would be taken away from her parents, since they were spending city resources on her and this was adversely affecting their ability to get their work done. Someone had to be looking the other way, or else the fine wouldn't be so low, and they wouldn't have been able to keep paying it for ten months without the Zan'ei asking questions about why two scientists were violating regulations. Still, they couldn't keep this up forever, and Soliel knew it, and her parents knew she knew it.

If she was taken away, the city would put her in the hospital and try to see if she could be cured, but if she couldn't? The city, even Master X, could not pay a ration to anyone who didn't work. Especially a human, because of laws left over from when the city was founded and everyone was suspicious of each other. Anyone who tried to take over Soliel's expenses would first have to pay off, or at least arrange a payment plan for all the energy, resources and time that were spent in the hospital. They could appeal to Judge Childre, but even the Judges couldn't make expenses like that vanish. Couldn't make exceptions like that. Her parents had tried to approach him six months ago, only to be told by a secretary they'd explained the problem to that almost the Judge's entire personal ration was already helping people.

Meanwhile, she kept getting worse and worse. Last week it had been vomiting. This week it was fevers and chills. All three of them knew she was dying: her parents were just trying to keep this going long enough for her to pass away in her own home, with her family there, instead of in some lonely room somewhere. They wanted her to be comfortable and die as happy as she could, but how could she rest comfortably while people she loved ruined themselves? How could that make her happy?

In hindsight, no one would be very surprised that she'd walked just outside and jumped down off the balcony, into the atrium. They'd cry and blame themselves and each other. They might dissolve the partnership, unable to bear the sight of each other, thinking of what they'd lost.

That was what Meadow's builder was counting on.

Meadow hadn't thought anything of her specs when she was turned on, and it was soon clear from how everyone acted that children were very important, so a model meant to look after them should be able to fight, yes. The trouble was that she didn't have a buster, or weapons meant to hurt reploids. She'd meant to ask her maker about that, when she was still with him, but the words wouldn't come out.

He'd taken her for what he'd said was combat training a week before she was given to Soliel. That was when she discovered that her data on the human body was to assist her in performing ambushes and inflicting maximum pain before death. That her outer construction wasn't just meant to be hypoallergenic, but to avoid leaving any traces forensic analysis might find. She was small and nimble to be able to catch up to a fleeing human without using dash boots, although she'd still have a problem in broken terrain. Being small would help her hide, though, and wait to strike.

He'd been very angry when his 'partner' snared the woman he wanted. Very angry. For the seven years since Soliel was conceived he'd seethed and worked on his special project and saved up resources.

It was clear to Meadow that this was wrong. The base ethical programming inherited from Master X said that hurting people was wrong, and she knew she wouldn't like being made to scream. Making someone scream also wasn't very fun. But her maker had saved up his ration.

Dr. Blanc had no intention of letting his tool betray him. Reploids had free will: he'd tried to program her, but he'd known it might not stick.

There was something that would.

It had taken him seven years to get the city to give him a cyber elf carte blanche. Normally the city took care of the elves and their lives. Only people doing very important work, where lives, data or resources might be lost if something went wrong and there was no elf to instantly fix it, were allowed to keep one on hand to use as needed.

Meadow couldn't blame the cyber-elf. It was probably even younger and more foolish than she had been: it probably hadn't known that altering a reploid so it had to obey someone was wrong. So it had to slip things into someone's food and drink. No matter how much it didn't want to.

So it had to pick someone up, carry her to the rim, lift her up and drop her. Even though it wanted to cry or scream for help or even kill herself. She didn't want to die, she didn't want anyone to die, it was too horrible a thing. She'd lived with the thought of Soliel's death for months, she'd lived with that poor man's blood in her hands, and she couldn't stand it. She didn't want anyone else to die because of what her creator had done to her, not even herself. She wanted to stop this but she couldn't even stop her own arms.

Couldn't stop her internal clock from ticking along to the time she'd have to kill a human. The word for that was _maverick_, the old monsters in the stories that ate reploid souls and took over their dead bodies and killed innocent people. She was one, and she'd prayed for Master X to kill her, to protect Soliel and her parents from this, but no one had come, just doctors that hadn't found anything and Dr. Blanc with more orders and there were no hunters anymore.

Now her arms were wrapped around Soliel like she was hugging her friend, and she wished she could comfort her, wished she could apologize, wished she could make the clock stop ticking. Wished this wasn't happening, not yet, not yet, Soliel had tried so hard to hang in there, day after day of pain and Meadow couldn't even buy her a single minute. She couldn't stop the internal clock, not when her systems used it for random number generation, called up the time hundreds of times a second.

But… there were other ways of generating random numbers, weren't there?

Error messages took priority over everything else, because she wasn't allowed to die. So, even if she messed up, she might buy Soliel another night? Until they found her here in the morning and Dr. Blanc came to fix her?

_Warning: This is a base function. Do not attempt to alter it without consulting a technician. Do you still want to alter it? _

The prompt appeared, and Meadow felt her arms return to her control for almost half a second before the geas made her systems select no, because this was an attempt to get out of what she was fated to do, bound to do.

That might have dashed her hopes, if she hadn't done this before. If she hadn't tried to many things to try to keep herself from hurting Soliel.

_Warning._

There was a lot she could do with half a second, like jerk her arms away from Soliel.

They crept forward again, but…

_Warning_.

Yes, she could do this… But maybe not, because each time her arms moved forward faster, body altering its speed to obey the deadline. She could hope that Soliel might wake up? That the drug might wear off?

_Warning_.

Again, and again, knowing there was no hope for that, and jostling Soliel like this wasn't good for her, but a half-second more, that was all she asked of Master X, Guardian Leviathan, anyone who would listen! Even Master Zero, even though Meadow was so used to failing, it was hard to believe that she might win, that she might deserve his blessing when she'd failed her friend for so long, but just one half-second, and one half-second more.

_Warning_.

She didn't want to be a murderer! Not again!

Meadow fell forward onto the bed as something pierced through her skin, an arrowhead attached to a cable, holding the cable in her body as she jerked again, this time because she was cold, so cold, processor racing until it was forced into hibernation.

Her audio receptors continued to function after her conscious mind shut down.

"Ten seconds." The human sounded mildly impressed. "How long do you estimate she'd have lasted?"

A reploid replied, "If she kept it up long enough, it would have broken some of that poor girl's bones, and that might have been more than she could take. If she let despair take over and she lost her will to fight, the elf programming would have taken over."

"So it was willpower?" For the record.

"Yes, sir."

"Then that indicates that she's not a willing accomplice, and that the elf wasn't used for virus-type will alteration." She'd been geased, not brainwashed.

"In my expert opinion, no, sir."

"Then shut down all peripherals and put her core into full hibernation."

"Process complete in three, t-"

That was when the memory ended. According to her internal clock, once she undid what she'd done to keep herself from looking at it, that was two days ago.

"Really?" the human wondered, the same human as that night. "Check the monitors."

A second's silence as the reploid stared.

"She's Dr. Blanc's masterpiece. The grea-second greatest... He used to be considered the greatest living reploid builder in Neo Arcadia."

Used to be? Meadow wondered. Hoped.

"There's a defense against the system we use to keep reploids in sleep mode, which is the reason we use that method." It was safer than others. "It was installed into you… You did study the tech specs of everything before it was installed into you, surely?"

"Of course, General Phantom sir. But she's…" So harmless-seeming, and yet, "Designed from the ground up to be an assassin," the reploid continued ruefully.

General Phantom? "Guardian Phantom?" she blurted out, opening her eyes. He'd come to save Soliel, right? That was what Guardians did! But, "Why didn't you stop me before?"

"Because we didn't notice anything was off with Dr. Blanc until last week." Sorry to disappoint a believer in his omniscience, but, "If I hadn't ordered a resource requisition audit of every single technician capable of building a reploid to see what side projects they were working on, I would have missed this. Or if Blanc had activated you earlier and taken the time to corrupt you, a child would be dead, Blanc would be in a position to comfort his brother's grieving wife and you would have had your personality wiped." So tragic, the poor girl must have blamed herself for failing in her duties. Wiped the personality and habits that had failed her charge, erased those terrible memories. The months of illness, the shattered body on the concrete below. "So I would say it's someone else you owe your life to, for giving me a wake-up call."

"Who?"

Phantom examined her thoughtfully. "I can't tell you, but perhaps I will put you in a position to return the favor. Someday."

Another reploid standing in the corner coughed. "Sir?" Is that advisable?

"You were the first to see her specs, Tech Kraken."

What seemed like a decoration on the reploid's arms were actually cables. Four of them were attached at the joint where the fingers of his hand were connected to his palm, and they were wound around his arms to keep them out of the way. Meadow gasped. "You're the reploid from last night! And… I thought you were a human, Guardian." She would have bowed a little, but she was strapped in.

"Voice analysis program," Tech Kraken told the other reploid present, the one who had been talking with General Phantom when she woke up. "General Phantom has a functioning voice box, as well as a speaker system. Am I right?" he asked Meadow.

"Spotting the difference at a young age is impressive. Unless you were told about it?" Phantom considered her.

Meadow frowned. "It was a difference. Like how reploids usually have armor and helmets and humans usually don't."

Phantom and Kraken looked at her with very similar expressions. Yes, it would be a criminal waste to let this one remain a civilian.

Perhaps, if they kept her busy enough, she wouldn't ask to see the Berg family until they had calmed down and were willing to be fair to her. Yet despite the fact researchers of their status could review the evidence and see that Meadow was innocent for themselves, they were not going to invite someone that had poisoned their daughter, an assassin-type built by a vengeful madman, into their home.

Well, their loss was the Zan'ei's gain.

Yet he wondered if Harpuia was right to be angry with him for not having Meadow brought in the instant they found Dr. Blanc had done extensive research on toxic substances _before_ his niece became ill. Schilt had insisted on observing her, giving her a chance to demonstrate some sign that there was a person in there worth saving, before beginning the judgment. Once she knew she was observed, and on trial, they wouldn't have been able to trust what she said. Phantom had agreed, and pointed out to Harpuia that they weren't going to see her resisting the use of nonleathal poisons, because she would already have tried what she could and Blanc would have closed those loopholes months ago. The girl's death, now: if she had any conscience at all, that would motivate her to try once again, and he'd been right.

Clearly they needed better oversight on researchers, despite some people's complaints about makework. Ciel's Copy-X was a well-intentioned project: this was not. Until they'd hit Blanc, the worst they'd found was untaxed alcohol production, mostly for personal consumption. Still, they needed to keep a lookout.

Who was another once-respected scientist with a secret project? _Weil_. It was time for Phantom to remind the Zan'ei of that.


	5. Album

_This is one of the things that happened while I was trying to write Chapter 45 of the main story. Craft thoughts on the situation and Copy-X turned into additional backstory/who Craft is in this 'verse. My brain wanders off easily these days. It might have also happened because I went and rewatched a lot of boss battles while brainstorming up characters for all those people (whew!). _

_Also, since I think a lot about the reploid take on my gender & those who choose to emulate it, I wanted to give some thought to reploid-style 'masculinity' as well, to be fair. Craft looks very rugged, has the whole protect the girl thing going on: Sadly in the series he's a chauvinist semi-stalker idiot who trusts Weil. Not exactly a good role model. Yet he seems to have invested himself in the whole mythos that males are tough and protect the people they care about, so what does it say about a reploid if that's the gender they choose to emulate, instead of choosing to be female or staying bishie/indeterminate since they don't see any reason to imitate or emulate something that has nothing to do with their species?_

* * *

><p>It was a weakness in a cameraman, but Craft never paid much attention to how people looked, with a few important exceptions.<p>

The first rule was to check how everything looked right before they went on the air, because no one wanted to look terrible in front of the entire city, or at least whatever percentage of it was actually watching, either on a personal workstation or on one of the public screens that ANN was allowed to send programming to provided that it was at least somewhat educational and they helped out maintenance by telling them if there were any problems with the public emergency advisory system.

The second rule was an ancient tradition going back thousands of years to when humans had ruled the earth and hadn't even invented magnets yet, according to Hiro, who had whispered it to him solemnly in the break room one day while Craft was playing the Guess What Neige's Upset About Now Game. Neige would always tell him once she calmed down, of course, but he figured that the more points he scored for figuring it out ahead of time, the less annoyed Neige would be about Craft, the one with an internal calendar, being the one to forget that they'd had a date to go sneak into the recently unlocked historical building while she'd been waiting there for an hour with a flashlight dodging Rekku archivists and Zan'ei guards. Better remembering late than never, right?

Honestly, aside from keeping himself in good condition, which showed that he was a good, solid, reliable reploid instead of too oblivious to keep himself clean or too irresponsible to do basic maintenance, he didn't understand why people got fussed about appearance. Certainly not enough to spend their savings on it instead of something practical like, oh, reducing the noise he made when he walked or getting a deposit and moving costs together for the larger private place they'd be eligible for after Neige had a kid.

(Mini Neige, or Mini Neige ver. 2.0. That was still a weird thought. Neige was a few years older than him, but they'd met when she was mini-sized, although less mini than a new human would be. Well, it wouldn't be another Neige, only one-half Neige's programming, so he wouldn't have to be jealous of whoever the mini Neige eventually dragged home. If he was human, Neige's kids would be one-half him too, but there was already one Craft-and-Neige team. Also, maybe he could find a donor that was a coward and the combination would add up to someone with some basic caution, because as much as he liked Neige's relentless, daredevil pursuit of anything she wanted, which included him, he already had one Neige to look at. He meant after. Really.

Although it was kind of flattering that Neige wanted a tall male with black hair for the first one, since according to the educational series they did to teach each race about the other and let them know what others might think if they weren't filled in, humans selected mates these days for the sake of love, companionship and someone reliable to partner with, but their programming had evolved it in order to find good programming to combine their own with to produce optimal new models.)

Still, it mattered to some people more than others, so humans had developed a rule that applied to reploids too. Craft knew that Hiro hadn't been joking: not only did it work, but he saw humans applying it in old movies and TV shows all the time.

It went like this: If you had a mate, and someone asked you who looked the best to you, the answer was your mate.

It made good, solid sense. After all, if you didn't think they were the best, then why were you mated to them?

That was when Craft had gotten a sense of personal aesthetics: beautiful meant 'like Neige.' Vibrant blue eyes, short red hair because she had so much more important stuff to do than fuss over it. Practical clothing, either bright so she'd be easy to spot in an emergency situation or drab so she wouldn't be.

And if you weren't Neige, then you should be solid. Rugged, reliable, hard working: a solid piece of equipment or a human who had put some work into making sure they could count on their body in a pinch, even if it meant raising their metabolic rate and cutting into the amount of their ration they could spend on luxuries. Either way, working hard on something that mattered, instead of just trying to coast, do the minimum they could get away with and still get their ration.

He might have assumed that people who cared about how they looked were that kind of loser if he hadn't met Milan, who had taught him the ancient art of photography. If you were going to do something, you should do it properly. If you were going to make something, then it should look right: form followed function, after all. If you were going to produce a show, that show should be accurate. For him not to care about how his pictures looked would be like Neige not caring about whether the information she'd gathered and was telling to the people of Neo Arcadia was true. Although he didn't know about that 'truth beauty, beauty truth,' stuff. If you were doing work, then you should put your back into it, physical labor or not.

The right picture could speak a thousand words. Look at someone's external appearance, and you were looking at what they wanted to become and/or what they wanted you to see (humans considered that automatically, while most reploids had to have it pointed out to them that someone trying to figure them out would figure visual data into that analysis).

That led to rule three: keep tabs on the people around you, and note any major changes. Not just structural changes to reploids: even a new paint job or a new wardrobe cost money, time and effort, so it was probably a good idea to comment on it.

He'd learned this when a new reploid trainee had asked him if he noticed anything different and ended up crying when first he said he hadn't noticed any changes around the place and then asked what was wrong.

Turned out she'd been saving up for a really long time, and _agonizing _over which of the improvements she should do first, because she wanted to be a reporter like Neige someday but that meant everyone would be looking at her and judging her! So she'd identified as a female model since that meant she had more options for how she wanted to look and started trying to create an image for herself, so she'd look like someone well-established who knew what they were talking about instead of some newbuilt right out of the factory who would probably believe anything instead of someone people would listen to the way they did Neige.

At least she hadn't been trying to look like Neige, although that was probably because Pic, the deeply cynical reploid who reported on the social scene, had told her that for Master's sake, no one liked a poser and if she couldn't trust herself to make judgment calls about how to look, then he certainly wasn't going to let her chose what to report.

Pic was known for his finely tuned sarcasm on camera, which was made even more amusing by the way that his face mold made him look kind of dopey, or permanently depressed, so there was a disconnect between how he looked and what he was saying that human viewers enjoyed. Pic himself enjoyed puncturing egos and commenting on fads as well as keeping track of who was sitting where and reporting the current scores & recent plays in the decades-old mess hall & atrium wall art competition/territory marking. It was more than half sport, because it took skills to get in, do something good enough to win points and get out before the defenders responded, especially when fouls tended to end in arrests.

The Zan'ei weren't allowed to compete, but since it was sort of a war exercise they'd overlook someone running in the halls as long as they didn't knock into anybody, and blockers temporarily defending painters as long as they didn't make it impossible for bystanders to get where they were going, although gawkers often did more than enough blocking, provided the show was good enough.

The graffiti artists had started out dodging the Zan'ei, but Master X had told the Zan'ei to let them paint: it encouraged creativity and made Neo Arcadia seem like someplace people lived instead of a barracks to have art on the walls. That took some of the fun out of it until the limited space made people start painting over others' work.

That, obviously, had meant war, although over the five decades or so since it had started things had become pretty civil and the rules were agreed on.

Practically all of the serious competitors were human, since they had the agility to run through a crowd without the risk of someone squishy getting run over by a lot of metal: getting knocked into by a human wasn't going to seriously damage a reploid. Wrist rotation was also an issue, apparently. Not to mention they had an instinctive grasp of art, how colors fit together and that kind of thing. Reploid efforts to paint weren't _as _likely to turn out badly as reploid efforts to compose music, but reploids had to learn the theory if they wanted to do more than just copy things. At least it took humans just as much work to learn the theory and get actual skills, base programming or no base programming.

Since one of the conditions of ANN being granted the station, the offices, their rations and all of it was reporting on 'arts and culture,' Pic covered that, as well as where the better musicians were hanging out. The city couldn't give anyone who wasn't contributing to the survival and welfare of the city's population a full ration, so Master X had set this thing up where if they performed before a board of judges and were certified they got a small base ration, about equivalent to the bonus someone could get for having a valuable skill even if they weren't using it in their current position, and they had to earn the rest by actually doing what musicians were supposed to do, which was providing music and hoping people wanted to pay them for it.

It wasn't just music: Hiro had managed to scrape by as a poet, editor, translator of ancient languages (human or programming), finder of appropriate potential names for young reploids and human children and generally done odd jobs involving words before he joined ANN. There were plenty of nook jobs in Neo Arcadia, if you knew they existed and knew how to look. Young reploids sometimes complained that there was nothing but factory work, but what was wrong with factory work? Once you were off-shift, you were off-shift: they couldn't work them too long to avoid wearing out the components, so it gave them free time to explore, as long as they were careful with their energy budget.

Neige and Craft now, between their job and their relationship they didn't really have free time anymore, not that he missed it. He had two important things he enjoyed to fill his time with.

Something he'd rather not fill his time with was crying interns. After agonizing all those months, she'd blown her savings on upgraded dash boots: stylish _and _practical, since it meant she could get around faster.

She'd wanted to know if he approved, since she couldn't dream of asking Neige, and then he didn't even see any difference! Had she worked all those months, spent all that energy for nothing? Had she made a bad choice, done something stupid?

Then she'd gone into despair about how she could never be a reporter, she just wasn't good at all, and Craft wished his memories were a little less detailed, or fuzzy the way human memories got, because yes: He _had _overreacted that easily at that age, even though crying didn't help. It had just made the small human cling tighter and talk more, trying to cheer him up. If he'd gotten angry she would have left after a bit, but Neige couldn't leave someone who was crying! Craft hadn't been faced with any real obstacles yet, so he hadn't known if he had overcome them. After you saw a few problems, you developed some confidence and things didn't seem so insurmountable anymore. He had Neige too, for backup and she had confidence in him. He wasn't the near-newbuilt that had panicked over adhesive small children anymore.

So he was left to pat the newbuilt on the shoulder and thank Master X he was past this stage, because by _Phantom_, it would be embarrassing to have an episode like this in front of everyone, even if they were all ignoring the female model tactfully and sympathetically because they'd been there too. It was times like this that he _loved _being sixteen. Oh sure, he hadn't started out with the best materials, and all the newbuilts that were around these days because of the generators making them affordable were calling him the old man, but being older, having been there and done that was _great_.

Even though he personally didn't care if his armor was multicolored or what have you, some people, especially young people who still weren't very confident in themselves, did care, a lot. Being looked up to meant he had a responsibility, even if Neige had to deal with a lot more of it. The increase in construction meant that there were a lot of young reploids out there trying to find their way, while he had an important job, a good store of energy saved up for a rainy day & a wife that ensured his life would never be boring.

Confusing and upsetting as it had been at the time, getting grabbed out of all the reploids there was flattering, in retrospect, and then he'd realized that it was the most interesting thing that had ever happened to him. Neige didn't have a sword, back then she hadn't even had a gun, but that was his call to adventure. Adventure wasn't pleasant: it was tough and difficult, but that was what made it adventure. If there weren't any challenges, it was just a waste of time.

So when Neige said she wished they could go head out into the wastes to interview all kinds of people, and he knew that if they tried something like that it'd make a great series but their transport was going to break down at least once & they'd get attacked by mechanaloids. He was filling out the paperwork for a civilian to requisition a rocket launcher the next day.

Her eyes went big when he came home with it, and she flung her arms around him and said a lot of excited stuff, including, "Have I told you lately that you're _the best_?"

Which led to the fourth rule: pay attention that your mate thinks about your appearance, and what they want to see in a mate.

Especially since his had very good taste, if he said so himself. And he did.

* * *

><p><em>Re. Mini-Neiges: Given Craft's physical design, they shall use their dad as a jungle gym, pretend he's a ride armor while playing Hunters and Mavericks &amp; win most 'my dad can beat up your dad' contests.<em>

_There's an XKCD with 'it's neat how you contain a factory for making more of you.' It was interesting to think about how someone from a species that doesn't have sexual reproduction & rarely has a family-equivalent would think about and deal with the resulting small, dependent, mostly harmless additions to what was originally a two-person dynamic._

_Milan is one of the Resistance members that dies protecting Ciel in the first game. Between the name itself and the fact he has a clear visor, which could mean that he doesn't need vision-boosting equipment because he has good-quality eyes, so he just needs the lenses to protect those eyes from sand and shots, I thought this was a good profession for him. _

_Someone whose job related to seeing things as they are would have a good chance of spotting that something was wrong in Neo Arcadia and knowing to get out, and if he had his ear to the ground he'd have a better than average chance of finding out about the Resistance and how to get picked up by them._


	6. Wonderful Timing

Dark brown hair pulled back in a bun, Dr. Rocinolle stared at the courier, who was leaning against the wall, gasping for breath. "Slow down now, it's not necessarily a good idea to flood your system with oxygen," she found herself saying automatically. Oh dear, they weren't pushing the couriers too hard, were they? She hoped someone was keeping an eye on them. The professionals would know their limits, but… No, surely the situation wasn't serious enough to make a human push themselves hard past their limits, using emergency capabilities to deliver their message and _then _die.

Of course, the runner who had named what Neo Arcadia called 'Marathon Syndrome' forced himself that hard to bring home news not of an emergency but of victory in battle.

So, she told her to, "Drink some of that water," the couriers always carried water mixed with sugar and salt, to replace the amount used up by their cooling system, "And _then_ could you repeat that?"

Rocinolle's build was more than a little plump, since that was the best way to fit in the extra supplies and systems a medic could need at any moment. She'd noticed humans considered the shape motherly, since having too much body fat was criticized and considered wasteful for everyone except expectant and nursing mothers, and it really had made humans even more willing to listen to her, except when their territorial instincts were flaring up. Although she'd rather have a human patient than a reploid patient any day: reploids might have the mental capacity of an adult human, but they rarely had the life experience. Humans might forget instructions since their memories weren't searchable, but generally even the ones, like this one, who supposedly weren't even up to a newbuilt reploid's maturity level yet had seen enough to know that yes, a doctors' orders were important.

As expected the courier nodded an obedient 'of course,' switching to deep breaths for a few seconds before taking a drink, looking at Rocinolle apologetically. Garbling a message was embarrassing even for someone who had only signed up with Serpent (Serpent Couriers: _As swift and accurate as our namesake_!) a couple months ago. "The wounded and as much equipment as possible to be prepped for transport. Signal use is authorized to coordinate transport and determine what will be sent where. Limited teleport use is authorized, but keep it down," she recited, holding up one of the stamped and dated papers departments sent with messengers to authenticate them. "Sending medical staff and rare equipment takes priority over the common equipment they'll have there already. Move the most severely wounded last."

"I'm sorry, I didn't mean to imply you weren't delivering your message clearly. I just hoped I hadn't heard you right." Did Judge Biblio even have the authority to order something like this? No, he wouldn't have if it wasn't what needed to be done, not at a time like this, but…

They couldn't send the worst cases last: they'd have to be sent with the machines that were keeping them stable.

"I'll switch on our com station," Dr. Doight said as Dr. Rocinolle wished there was someone she could ask what on earth the Judge was thinking. Well, he was considered one of the wisest in Neo Arcadia for a reason, and she'd often talked with him about new treatments, or rather old ones he'd dug up in the archives. Still!

If their medical equipment was being sent to the front to shorten the turn-around-time of wounded soldiers and support the assault, shouldn't they have been notified earlier?

Couldn't someone have told them before she _let them get drunk_?

"-there are no fighter pilots down in hell: Oh, the place is full of wets, ground-pounders and cadets, but there are no fighter pilots-" The ancient Rekku song proclaiming their dubious moral superiority over the Meikai marines, Jin'en infantry & stupid young officers echoed in her audio receptors as well as off the blue-and-white walls again, since it was no longer something she could filter out. Not when she'd have to get them all moved, and not in a conga line.

The mobile human members of the Meikai, Zan'ei and Jin'en scouting teams (the Tan Berets) were tracing comet-like orbits around an area of oversized berths reserved for larger reploids, using the cooling system of one berth and an obliging patient's flamethrower to store and roast a giant squid that had come in with the patients on one of the Meikai's ambulance vehicles. After all, if they'd been attacking a base that deep down _anyway… _

Since consuming animal protein helped humans heal faster, the hospital actually had some with every meal, although it took quite a bit of doing. Giant squid were one of the very few species left that humans could eat which were large enough to _fight back_. Rocinolle, as a doctor, really didn't understand the appeal of killing and consuming something that had demonstrated it wanted to live, but perhaps there was some sense of fair play involved. It wasn't as though the squid didn't win sometimes: she'd had more than one adventurous reploid half-crushed by tentacles rushed to her.

A human whose suit was broken at that depth wouldn't live long enough to register that they were about to die, let alone stay conscious long enough to be eaten alive. The thought of it still made her shudder.

The diagnostic reason for giving them alcohol could be summed up in four words or one acronym: post-traumatic stress disorder. Humans had built-in logic holes that tried to keep their brains from processing the implications of killing other sentient beings and having other sentient beings try to kill them (the second was almost worse for a species that had first survived and then risen to the top by working together as communities and their subconscious knew it), but since it was survival-related data, their brains would start processing it anyway if the combat lasted too long, and nightmares as their brains repeatedly processed the data and flashbacks when something triggered a play-by-play replay of an especially significant situation weren't the worst that could happen.

Rumor had it that Weil was.

Adult humans, especially soldiers, always tried to hide it when something was wrong, or at least hide how badly it affected them for various reasons. It was showing weakness, after all, and according to her psychology instructor that was a very dangerous thing to do around predators, like dogs and cats. And humans. It wasn't just fear, of course: by acting as though things would be okay they reassured their comrades. Not to mention small humans and now younger reploids that would be looking to them for an example of how to behave.

Humans learned to always keep one eye on how they were acting, to think over things before they said them as they matured, which was a good idea for reploids too. That was why Rossignol hadn't blurted out her complaint at the poor courier who didn't have anything to do with it. While yes, it was deceptive not to just say what they were thinking without editing everything, it certainly was more considerate than evil. Saying things without thinking of how others would interpret them first meant she could hurt their feelings by accident, and that was the last thing she wanted.

By scrambling human brains, though, alcohol made it very hard for humans to do that. The fact they knew it had that effect meant it generally didn't even take that much, because humans didn't especially like watching all their actions all the time. It was quite a lot of work to be mature and considerate. Thus, alcohol was like a special dispensation from the Guardians to be off duty and do prettymuch anything they felt like within same limits. No wonder they liked the stuff, despite their chemical analysis systems rightly identifying it as poison and giving them an alert in the form of an unpleasant, bitter taste.

And while their defenses were down, the psychologists and chaplains had a much better chance to identify those who had started to realize the true significance of war and violence and help them find some way to understand it, a context to put it in, other than that the world was mad and Weil was right.

'Replibeer' was one of the first things invented by a third party after the development of reploids. Rossignol did have to wonder if it was just for the sake of parties or because someone had been unsure about the new race and wanted to see how they thought when their circuits were too fried to lie.

Both were technically poisons, but all medicines were and there wasn't any harm in letting soldiers celebrate a victory, especially when the endorphins plus alcohol, or the reploid equivalent helped overwrite and distract their systems from the pain. It was harder for Neo Arcadian reploids to shut down their pain receptors: Rocinolle and the other doctors could do it, but Master X had developed a pain system for a reason, after all. If something went wrong with one of their patients, they needed to know immediately. Keeping alerts from reaching their processors wouldn't help.

As for the humans, all of them were on as many painkillers as it was safe to give them, but beyond the normal 'mostly safe' kinds (everything was toxic to humans, sadly), Neo Arcadia only had one that was made from a flower, oddly enough. The trouble was that it was so effective because it mimicked one of the chemicals humans used for cost-benefit analyses (human biology allowed them to ignore pain if the gain was sufficient), meaning that all humans were _born _addicted to it. If exposure to it wasn't handled properly, it would trick their systems into thinking that getting more of the poppy gum was more important than anything else.

The idea of something controlling one's thoughts like that was so horrible to reploids, in the aftermath of the virus and Weil's elves, that they were always _extremely _reluctant to prescribe opium. Yet no doctor wanted anyone to be in pain.

The high of victory, the fog of endorphins and good fellowship that engulfed the wards produced quite a bit of the same biochemical effect, as little as Rocinolle liked the idea of humans consuming flesh that surely contained a little too much of the heavy metals & the poison that was alcohol. Dr. Doight always laughed when she winced at a human drinking: She understood why, after hearing his stories about field surgery where all they had was the alcohol that served double-duty as disinfectant and something for the human to bite down on, so they could try to focus on killing the 'attacker' before it killed them, tricking the brain into overriding the pain at least somewhat in the interest of survival. He'd been reminiscing with a Jin'en field medic before he noticed the courier's arrival.

"There may come a time when a lass needs an evac-" The singer was human: a reploid would have said 'rebuild.' Rocinolle had heard both versions of that song quite a few too many times.

"Then busters are a girl's best friend," came the chorus, containing quite a few male voices that were singing along just because there was singing going on and were likely too young, if they didn't recognize the song, to understand the moral of the human version (fight as hard as you can while you can, so when you're too old or crippled to fight you won't have to stand there and watch the murder of innocents) or the reploid version (get those battle bonuses and save up for a rebuild while ye may, because combat's hard on the systems and for a warrior to be taken out of the fight when they, unlike our sisters-in-arms, could have prevented it is unforgiveable). As applicable to them as the second was. Neo Arcadia's citizens were given a ration with the assumption that they would use it to see to their own maintenance and ensure that they were able to do their work. If the city gave a reploid combat upgrades and that reploid lost them due to balking at pricy 'optional' maintenance and parts replacements, the city damn sure wasn't going to pay for a second set.

Well, Rocinolle thought, the city's considerable grapevine meant that quite a few family members and retired members of the armies (who were also practically family, especially for the reploids) had come by to visit and stayed here after the announcement to help out. Which really meant to party, but there wasn't anything wrong with that. Visitors helped recovery.

The trouble was that if she tried to break up the party the newbuilts, at least, would be rather upset. A rather upset person of either species and molecules that inhibited higher functions and judgment calls were not a good combination.

It was rather hard to keep enterprising humans from setting up stills, but the city did its best to keep tabs on alcohol because it intensified emotions and loosened the control the human consciousness had over other functions.

Young reploids just had poor judgment, and if they were in the armies then they'd already made the connection that problem plus a few good bolts of plasma equaled no more problem. They'd learned that killing things solved problems, and hadn't made the connection that if what one killed were _people_, then no, it didn't. Not when there were such things as pissed-off friends and Zan'ei officers. If anything, it tended to multiply the number of problems.

Humans were just as bad. While for reploids, based on Master X, not attacking others was the default unless it was overridden by life experience or learned behavior, humans were automatically preset to respond to obstacles either by avoidance or violence. Fight or flight. Life experience quickly taught most humans that violence wasn't the right answer in ninety-nine percent of cases, and they learned to kick their inner assault mechanaloid back into the garage so they could think up more effective tactics. After all, shooting one's supervisor rarely helped one make deadline.

Yet when their self-control had wandered off in search of a drink, military humans, who unlike civilians actually had experienced circumstances where the application of firepower was the only viable solution, would start swinging. Then the humans around them would join in. Some because they got caught in the crossfire and interpreted it as an attack, some trying to stop the fight and others because it looked like fun.

It wasn't just her wards: Rocinolle knew that humans and reploids all over the city must be breaking out the good stuff to celebrate their victory over Weil. But her wards were her _problem_.

"So then the human said, 'Retreat? Hell, we just got here!' We would have used the first part for our motto, but profanity gets depowered if it's overdone and that guy's unit used that for _their _motto, and you can't steal someone else's."

"-Oh, there are no fighter pilots in the city: We're off to foreign skies-"

Storytelling Meikai commandos and off-key Rekku alike. As Rocinolle thought that a Zan'ei barked at one of the least melodious songbirds to watch the frequencies of his vocal output, dammit, or he'd be up on charges for assaulting an officer's ears. Certain frequency combinations, especially high-pitched, bothered humans' brains. The resonance phenomenon was really fascinating, from the perspective of her research, although something like that would be a security problem for a reploid.

She sighed, rolling back the sleeves of the traditional coat. It wasn't as though 'I don't want to' or 'It's going to be hard was ever an excuse for a doctor.

* * *

><p><em>Mmm, just thought I'd toss this up here. I was trying to get my brain back into the swing of things more than anything else. That, and I first encountered the song, "There are no fighter pilots down in hell," in an anthology of SF stories set in hell as sort of a shared world, with historical figures rebelling and such. It turned out the song had been set up as a prayerchant/spell, and all those decades of pilots singing it in bars had given it considerable power… _


	7. Intermission

_This was originally posted as part of the main story, but I'm doing a little housekeeping and moving it over here. Carry on. _

_In any case, think of this as a 'behind the scenes' type-thing, taking place after Ch. 37 of Definition of a Reploid. I do like how they're all immediately trying to use this to their advantage._

"You _broke _your ID card. You _broke _your… We can't replace those! Only Father has the codes!" Harpuia threw his hands up in the air, pacing angrily with his wings fully extended.

It might have been more intimidating to Leviathan if she wasn't used to Harpuia's 'angry budgie look.' She just shrugged."Yes, but we should have realized that and started keeping them somewhere safe instead of taking them on combat missions years ago. At least this way we still have three, and destroying one to keep it out of Weil's hands is better than getting them destroyed accidently because our armor was damaged."

Harpuia had to admit that, sadly. Taking a deep breath and retracting his wing panels, he said, "At least we still have three."

Fefnir chuckled. "Yeah, about that?" He'd been fighting _Omega_.

Harpuia's face met his palm. "And mine is…" Hooked into Harpuia's systems, which were currently channeling the power of the upper atmosphere. Well, if there was a surge protection systems failure severe enough to burn out the card, Harpuia himself was unlikely to survive it. At least Phantom's was back in Neo Arcadia with his empty body. "We'll have to give one of them to him as soon as he gets back, so that he can use it to control any systems that aren't fooled by his imitation of Fathe…What happened?"

Copy-X whimpered.

"He's been like this when he's not on stage for the last what, ten chapters?" Leviathan folded her arms at Harpuia: he was only noticing this now?

"What happened?" Was it Weil?

"Spoilers," Leviathan said succinctly. "The first thing made him all worried, the second blue screen'd his processor."

Copy-X winced and whimpered again at the reminder. Leviathan patted him on the back. "Don't worry; it's just a cyber elf and a surgery." And they could recycle cyber elves now.

"But no one knows that it needs fixing!" He wouldn't remember when this was over.

"Well, that's a good sign, right?"

"What?" Harpuia asked.

"Apparently we're raising him right." Leviathan shrugged. "Don't worry about it. I mean, look at him." She waved in Zero's direction.

"Leviathan!" Harpuia glared at her for a moment. "Don't worry," he told Copy-X. "I know that you're responsible, and… I know you won't abandon your responsibilities and all the people that are counting on you like a _certain someone_." He'd assumed Leviathan was indicating a certain deadbeat dad that was leaning against Zero's shoulder.

Copy-X shook his head and said in a small voice, "That's not what I'm worried about. But… I _should _leave, if I can't be…"

"Oh, right." Fefnir snapped his fingers. "Hey, Dad, can I get the security codes…"

"You won't remember them in the main story anyway, remember?" Ciel said, after her mother let her go. The real reason was that she didn't want anyone to disturb the two of them.

Harpuia was torn between giving X a piece of his mind and comforting Copy-X. So what if X was worried he'd grown too willing to kill? He could have _told _them. He had family that was more than willing to keep an eye on him: finding out that he'd abandoned them because he didn't trust them to do that? Finding out that X had _expected _Neo Arcadia to start to fall apart despite their best efforts?

Wily growled under his breath and started towards the two of them, only to be halted abruptly by a kunai at his neck. "Don't even think about it."

Wily just smiled. "You don't really think you can stop me, do you? You and what army?"

Harpuia, Leviathan, Fefnir and Copy-X turned to stare at them. "_General_ Phantom," was the reply. "So… mine?" Actually, Phantom could call on all four armies if he needed to.

Wily laughed: he'd been hoping for just that response. "Yes, why don't you order them outside the city's walls so it'll be easier to slaughter them all at once instead of having to hunt them down." It would save time.

They heard the familiar hum of a charged shot. Wily blocked it, but shock kept Phantom from dodging in time to save the end of his red scarf. "I'm sorry," X said, and yawned, "but could you please keep it down? This is the first real sleep I've had in twenty years: I couldn't risk internalizing…" That callousness, that knowledge that all efforts failed, all love was lost, that had poisoned him, any more than he already had let it before he realized what was happening to him. "When this is over I'm going to have to go back to trying not to kill people who really don't deserve it, so I really need to rest, and I'm sorry, but the next person to wake me up _will _get vaporized."

He was very, _very _tired, and they were keeping him awake. That wasn't worth killing over, he _knew _that, even if it wouldn't stick, but what was worth killing over? Had everything he'd done to stop the virus been useless in the end? All killing was wrong, so would it really be any more wrong to be able to have a little peace, just a little? He sighed, leaning against Zero, resting his head on that that familiar sloped chest and humming a bit in thanks when that hair wrapped around him, like a blanket.

Zero opened his eyes and put a finger to his lips. He wasn't glaring per se, but they _would _keep it down, or _Zero _would handle it. X had been forced to fight alone for long enough.

"What about them?" Lark whispered, worried, glancing at the other side of the space they were currently in.

"Don't worry about it," Leviathan assured her. "I know Weil screaming is music to _my _ears."

Phantom looked very tempted to head over there, but he had a lot of failing as a bodyguard to make up for. Mourning his scarf, he walked back to stand next over X and Zero again. Very quietly.

"Think they'll let us have a turn with the piñata?" Fefnir wondered. "I'm surprised, though. Didn't think Aunt Cinny had it in her." Not that he disapproved. He totally approved of the combination of Weil, regeneration, and that claw weapon of hers. Marino was doing a few practice swings with an antique baseball bat, waiting for her turn.

Leviathan snorted. "She was _dead_." When Fefnir didn't get it, she elaborated. "She _watched_." And couldn't do anything while her loved ones suffered, because she was dead. "No, don't _you _watch," she told Copy-X, turning his head firmly the other way. "Someone in this family needs to think that torturing prisoners is wrong no matter how much they deserve it and all that kind of… decency." Innocence, idealism.

Wily might have muttered, "Damn Lightbots," under his breath. Oh, right. He looked around. "Where's that knockoff?" This time, instead of a kunai, it was a spear and Harpuia's two beam sabers. "I mean the _Zero _knockoff." Aurora, not Copy-X.

"With her…" Fefnir paused. "Mom or Aunt?"

"Both?" Leviathan asked.

Harpuia facepalmed again. "Why are you doing this? We all know that applying human genetic relationships to prototypes is ridiculous, otherwise we'd have millions of siblings." And three were more than annoying enough.

"Exactly. I'm annoying him." Fefnir pointed at Wily.

"Oh." Harpuia sighed. He supposed Fefnir could carry on, then. "If you want to be that sort of technical, he's our grandfather," through Zero, "and Aurora's twice over, by the way."

"Here, you take the kid. I'm going to go find my own blonde and play whack-a-bastard," Leviathan said, holding Copy-X out to Harpuia.

"Your blonde? One, she's in my army, two, she's…"

"Cleaned up very nicely," Leviathan interrupted. "And like you can talk." Harpuia would have responded that he was _not _going to do anything inappropriate, but Leviathan forestalled his objection with a pish. "Come on, if we dated in an acceptable age range by human standards there'd be what, the Judges and a few more like Andrew?"

"What's wrong with Andrew?" Neige looked up from her notepad to ask.

"You know you won't be able to keep your notes either, right?" Ciel reminded her.

That might have been a good thing, because Neige's response would have been unprintable. "He used to read us stories, remember? That was how I learned that words could have two meanings."

Ciel giggled. "The booty story! Was that you?"

"You heard about that?"

"The staff always talked about it when we were reading _Treasure Island_." Warning the new ones that they should watch for children trying to escape and go on treasure hunts.

More so than usual: sneaking out of the crèche was the best game. It wasn't something they got in trouble for, either, provided they didn't make too much trouble for anyone. It was better than other forms of rebellion, and the Zan'ei made sure to look after their future ninja. Shadowing them was a common training exercise for new recruits, since the children would be trying to avoid the crèche staff.

Craft laughed, because it was one of those things you looked back on and did that. "I went to Judge Childre because I didn't know how to remove the small human from my leg." He'd been half-panicked at the time, because that was the first time he'd seen a small human and Neige had looked really fragile. Everyone had been staring at him and no one had actually helped when he was trying to walk with it attached to his leg. Well, in all fairness, it _had _been really damn funny.

"That was back when 'No,' was my favorite word," Neige reminisced. "And booty." Because how cool was it that a word could have two meanings like that? She patted her husband's proprietarily. Best treasure hunt ever. "Seriously, you should give Cerveau a tryout. Reploids… Oh, right. Underage." And she'd been out in the wastes since she was seriously underage, not around her peers to overhear conversations about stamina and such things.

"He's my _partner, _and… Not that kind of partner!" Ciel said when Neige grinned.

"Riiiight." Did anything more need to be said? Neige looked away in order to end the conversation after having gotten the last word. Her eyes fell on the side of the room where Leviathan was taking her turn with the orange piñata. "There's a scoring panel now? Well, I guess they are judges."

Maybe it was some sense of masculine identity that made Craft wince at the ice and the teeth, even though anyone who attacked that area on him would just end up with a broken kneecap. Then he remembered what Weil would have done to Neige if he won and mentally awarded the Guardian a six. Not because it wasn't vicious and painful, but because hopefully that'd encourage her to try harder. Not that he actually dared say that score out loud.

Cinnamon tapped Phantom on the shoulder. "Aren't you going to come join us? And you shouldn't leave your daughter standing over there by herself."

Wait wait wait. "Daughter?" Harpuia exclaimed, because the other two were over there and hadn't heard their aunt.

On the one hand, _sleep_. On the other, grandchildren. X compromised by firing a warning shot right over Harpuia's head. The guardian still hit the deck, covering Copy-X protectively. "Why didn't you tell us?" Harpuia whispered harshly, raising his head.

Phantom pointed at his facemask and smirked. Ninja, come on. "I wanted her to be able to make friends. You know how the troops would have reacted." Complaining about favoritism, being worshipful or envious of the child one of the Guardians themselves had chosen to adopt, all that kind of thing. There were some crazy people out there, even if not as many as even twenty years ago. The Second Elf War was almost out of human living memory.

"But I'd never even met her before this!" Copy-X looked hurt, green eyes looking out from under Harpuia's lighter armor.

"_You _are a state secret," Phantom reminded him. "And she's only seven and a half months." And in Harpuia's army, not his own. They didn't put quite as much emphasis on how loose lips exploded bases.

"I'm adopted," Lark said, looking down at her feet as she fiddled with one nervously. "It's… really an honor," and Guardian Phantom shouldn't have, even though she wouldn't say that now because they'd already had that conversation.

Phantom walked over to her (_carefully,_ since he'd been standing so close to X), and nudged her at her grandmother. "You should get to know her. I have to…" He looked at Wily to make sure he hadn't tried anything.

Cinnamon was looking up at Wily. "We're not going to get any other time with our son, so please?"

Wily looked deeply disturbed. "That power source… Just tell me you're not the unholy spawn of That Idiot and Roll."

Cinnamon blinked and shook her head. "I was built by Doctor…"

Wily raised his hand. "Don't care." As though there were any scientists in 21XX other than Arciel and maybe Weil worth mentioning. "And don't think I won't kill you just because you're my daughter-in-law."

Cinnamon smiled brightly and raised her hands. She was still wearing those cute kitty gloves. With the _really sharp _claws. "_That's_ not the reason I don't think you'll kill me." Silly.

Zero opened his eyes. "If you are going to keep talking, _go somewhere else_."

"You uninstalled the buster I gave you in case it generated virus, and you gave your beam saber to that human. In order to attack me, you'll have to dump him on the ground," Wily pointed out, half contemptuous and half hoping he would. Actually, all contemptuous. "Enjoy your last moments of peace before I destroy Neo Arcadia and he drowns in desp-"

That shot wasn't charged. "Don't care. Just _go away_." He could go to Neo Arcadia and do just that for all X cared. He knew he _should_, but his give a damn was busted.

Literally. His suffering circuit had broken years ago and he hadn't noticed. He'd broken it himself and not known it, because he'd had to keep going, keep fighting, past the edge of despair and he could no longer carry the burden of anyone else's pain, not when it was battle enough to ignore his own.

Marino settled Phantom's dilemma by picking her son up and carrying him off without giving him a chance to object. Her experience as a thief had taught her that was generally the best way to acquire things, and cuties. "When did you get so short?" He was like Cinnamon's size now. Cute _and _convenient. They should have had X build him like this to begin with. She tucked Lark under her other arm.

"I know," Cinnamon agreed, keeping her voice down for X's sake. "We have to show Axl."

Harpuia was helping Copy-X stand up, apologizing for getting them shot at and knocking him down with a grimace. Copy-X shook his head to show that he didn't mind.

Since most of the loud people had gone away, Zero met Wily's eyes and pointed up. He had a kill sat and here and now, he remembered how to use it.

X, unseeing, clutched at Zero's armor and let out a soft little sigh. He wasn't alone. There was proof that sometimes, faith and hope were rewarded. He couldn't trust anyone else to protect anything, even themselves: they all died or fell but Zero, Zero came back to him. His partner was here: he was safe and the world was safe.

Sleep.

"A_ha_!" Marino exclaimed on the other side of the room. "I knew I had it somewhere." She handed it to Fefnir.

"What's this?" he asked, turning the glass and metal contraption over in his hands.

"It's an authentic oil lamp. It doesn't look quite like the one in the movie, but Aurora should fit in it."

"You'd better not steal Aurora! And she's not a genie," dammit.

"Tempting, but I like them a little more… solid." She pushed Fefnir in Arciel's direction. "Do you want to keep carrying her around in your body? …You _do_, don't you?" She laughed, Fefnir blushed angrily. But he went. Why did Aunt Marino always make him feel like he was two?

"You aren't going to have a turn?" Leviathan asked Harpuia, waving at the piñata.

"No." He looked at her disapprovingly. "_Someone _needs to set a good example." If you were going to kill someone, then you should kill them. The only reason he hadn't gone over to try to do just that was that Weil still had more scenes, apparently, and killing someone when they'd just come back to life was pointless. If you had to kill the enemy to defend people, then the point was to kill the enemy, not torture them, gloat or otherwise fuck around and give them a chance to escape and attack your people again.

Leviathan put her hands on her hips. "If you cared that much about good examples, then you should have stayed a female model."

Oh please. "Because a gender I don't have is _so _much more important than the rule of law, sentient rights and not lowering ourselves to the level of our enemies," Harpuia said dryly. "We're heads of state, Leviathan. The people of Neo Arcadia look up to us. We _cannot _think that this kind of thing is acceptable."

"This is _Weil._" And it wasn't like they'd even remember his later.

"It's not about Weil!" The air around Harpuia started to crackle. "Letting him dictate our actions? Letting _him _define what's acceptable, what _justice _is?" Leviathan needed to _think_ before she said stuff like that, dammit! "If he's making you do _anything_, then he's won! It has to be about principle, not about a bastard like…" Harpuia was stopped by a hand on his arm.

"Could you please not fight?" Copy-X asked Leviathan. "Harpuia's right, though," he said apologetically.

Leviathan sighed, but had to admit that, "You have a point. I'll make sure Fefnir doesn't take another turn, although he's busy now." The others were dead, so it wasn't their views that would determine the future. They didn't have a duty to Neo Arcadia to ruin their fun.

"And _don't corrupt my troops_," Harpuia told her, despite the certainty it would be ignored.

_Oh, and another reason I wrote this is that I kind of had a Blue Screen Of Deathed Copy-Xmuse, and I wanted to give him a chance to _be _BSOD'd so he could get over it and I could write him properly, instead of him becoming as impossible to write properly in his spazzing as Harpuia was in his anger with himself leading up to the Area Zero discovery chapter. Can't have both of the listed main characters getting demoted to extras, even if Harpuia totally deserved it for being difficult._

_Someone should write a fic of whatever degree of crack where Cinnamon is related to Roll and Forte. She's closer to Roll in design, but she's got Forte's power source. Her personality isn't really like either of them, though: she's a sweet and fairly passive (unlike Queen of the Household Roll) young reploid with the power to heal but OMFGclaws. 'That idiot' is what Forte gets called in Gigamix, and he certainly earned it. Also, why do my attempts to write crack end up this serious, and vice versa?_


	8. Chronic Hero Syndrome

_So, I thought 'I should write something' and found myself typing something in the vague universe of the sequel to _Definition _I'd like to write someday, but preferably when I'm doing a little better._

_This is a noncanon 'what-if': when this happens in the actual story, Zero will be trapped in cyberspace and X & WilyAI in the real world, the opposite of what happens in the 'verse of this scene. Thank goodness._

_Also,_ Princess Bride _quote._

* * *

><p>She stood there in reploid form, waiting. It took focus to remember how she used to look and project it. Keeping up the appearance took up a certain percentage of her attention and put her at a disadvantage, the way all distractions did, but as a miniature cyber-elf, it would be hard for someone to see that her arms were folded, or that she had a disapproving look on her face, if they even cared enough to look that closely.<p>

The X she'd met when she joined the Maverick Hunters would have. Absolutely. Even when he was on a mission, he would have found a smile for her, and listened to what she had to say, trusting that it was something important. Trusting her not to waste his time, when people were in danger.

He never would have seen _her _as a waste of time.

Now, well now. Now she was standing in his way.

The X she knew back then would have tried to convince her to move. Even during the Eurasia incident, he hadn't wanted to fight the people standing between him and the components they needed, and not only because it was a waste of time.

He approached in his cyber-elf form, and when he finally noticed her… no, he would have noticed she was here when he arrived in this particular space, if not before. When he finally _acknowledged _that she was here, it wasn't by taking reploid form. Not even the manifestation where he floated in midair, surrounded by rings of energy. When the X she'd known hadn't wanted to remind people he had the power to obliterate them. Hadn't wanted them to think that he was above them, looking down. Now, his manifestation screamed power and distance, not just warning people to keep away but making it a fact that if they tried to come too close, if they tried to touch him, it would hurt.

Those rings weren't even lowered for Zero, who darted between them, or appeared already inside of them, arms around X. He had to stay close then, because moving too far away from X meant he could hit a ring, but that meant that Zero, too, wasn't reaching out to them. They couldn't come close enough to him to pat him on the back or extend a hand either.

She didn't like that, and it wasn't healthy, but Alia wasn't going to say that to X. Not when she was already doing something more than suicidal enough, she thought as that orb of light expanded, and kept expanding.

_I'm going to die_, she thought when the edge of it came within a meter of her, or at least what seemed like a meter. It wouldn't be the first time X had killed her.

It wasn't that she wasn't grateful. Any hunter would take death over the virus, and he'd gotten her in time that the information she'd sent out and tampered with, well, only one unit was wiped out. A few others were savaged, but it would have been so much worse. She remembered thinking of just how bad it would be and _glorying _in it.

If she didn't move, she was going to die. X had killed her before.

She didn't move. It wasn't that she was too terrified to move, or that it wouldn't have done any good to run. If X wanted her dead, he would have just killed her, and he wasn't the kind of person to give someone hope of escape and then shoot them in the back. Not even now. That would have required caring about his targets, about the people who were in his way.

Giving her a chance to run was all she could expect from those rock-hard green eyes… She wasn't burning.

Engulfed in white, and not burning.

_It had gotten past her_.

She whirled to see the sarcophagus intact, for the moment, before realizing what she'd thought.

No, _he _had gotten past her, why was she thinking of X, even this manifestation of light, as an it, as some terrifying thing? Even if, she knew, that was exactly the effect he'd intended, to remind her that it was _pointless _to try to fight him. That she shouldn't even try, she shouldn't make him have to kill her.

The elaborate maze constructed around the sarcophagus was gone, overwritten by empty white that began to dim, began to split apart into crystals, no, prisms, beams of light and the hum of power all around her. The representation of X's systems. The mind that the virus couldn't infiltrate, couldn't influence.

Her eyes widened, despite her effort to not show intimidation, no matter what she felt and he might be able to sense. There wasn't really any point in trying to hide the obvious? She would have to be a fool not to see the implications here. He'd _overwritten _the cyberspace fortress they'd created to block access to the sarcophagus?

X hadn't changed his manifestation to intimidate her. That wasn't an acknowledgement of her presence. He'd ignored her and carried out his plan without dealing with her first. She hadn't even qualified as an obstacle.

Now, he manifested, hovering not just over the plane where she stood, but over the lid of the sarcophagus, rings appearing around him, the manifestation of his willingness to cut anyone who came close to him _burning_, cutting its way through the lid of the sarcophagus.

She watched him, and he knew she was and didn't react. Of course she watched him, she was his spotter, once upon a time.

Of course she called out to him. That was her job. "What are you doing? We don't know what's going on, but he's…" No, right now, X wouldn't care what happened to humans _or _reploids. "Your enemy!" No, that wasn't the right approach either. "What will he try to do to Zero?!"

The ancient turned his head, but didn't look at her. "Someone," he said, with a terrible calm. "Has cut this space off from…" The real world, but that wasn't important. "_Has separated me from Zero_. And here we have the person who first discovered how to connect these two spaces."

"He's not going to _help you_," Alia said, because that was absurd.

"Yes," said X. "He will. You're a good person, Alia, and a sane one." So she didn't know what she was talking about, when it came to Dr. Wily. She got the message: X was implying that he did, because he wasn't either. Not anymore. "I don't need him to help me. Oh, he very well might, because I'm my father's son, but all I need is for him to be himself. He's the tool I need to accomplish this mission." And hadn't she guided him through doing terrible things, for that very reason? Killing reploids to get the parts to destroy Eurasia and all its inhabitants?

"You want to pretend that you don't have a conscience. That you don't care that he's going to find some way to make people suffer."

"I…"

"Don't remind me that you cut your suffering circuit. You _created _that circuit in the first place." He didn't _need_ it, not really, if only he'd just think about what he was doing!

X frowned, unamused that she'd cut him off when he was bothering to kill time explaining himself to her. Dr. Ciel's protections seemed to still be holding, but how long until X was done? "Based on the fundamental architecture of my understanding of the laws of interaction, yes. While I was in the capsule. While I was somewhere sane. Then, I spent far more years than that century in a very, very different world." War. "We're at war, Alia."

Yes, that was the majority theory among the former Maverick Hunters, but jumping to conclusions was never a good thing: they needed to consider alternate possibilities, and if she could get him thinking about them? "We've been cut off from the real world…"

"No, Alia. This is an attack. What do you think is happening, back on Earth? What do you think is happening to all the reploids and cyber-elves that are dying, right now, with no cyberspace to go to? This isn't a natural phenomenon. Someone did this on purpose, and it's not a one-time event, but a steady state, meaning it's being _generated_. Someone knows that they're putting anyone who dies right now at risk of final death, and they're not stopping." It had been hours: even if they hadn't known that something was blocking off cyberspace before, anyone with the resources and knowledge to do this kind of thing had to know by now, had to be observing the result of their experiment. Had to consider it a success, not a horrific failure with far too high a cost.

"Right now, there is someone who lets innocents die and doesn't care, that possesses enough power to cut Earth off from cyberspace. What do you _think _they are doing with that power?" he asked her. "Zero will fight this person. Because Zero is like that." Without X.

Zero? Zero was in the other world? Alia knew that already, Sigma had told them when this started, they'd checked on X, Zero, Dr. Wily, X Arc and the Mother Elf, all the beings who might have had enough power to pull this off.

She should have realized this before. Zero was based in cyberspace. That was why destroying his physical body hadn't killed him. Had changing himself in Axl's body changed that? Was Zero entirely in the real world? Could he, could he really die this time? _Really? _

It didn't seem possible, especially seeing X like this. They had the infinite potential system. They'd started out far stronger than reploids and they were only getting stronger.

"Zero's mind is on the other side, but his body is still here. Dr. Wily's mind is on this side, but the device that generates his prison is not_,_" X told her. "Now do you understand why I want him released under controlled circumstances?"

"You could have…"

"What you know, he might possibly find out from you," X said grimly. "Dr. Wily is on this side. _Zero _is on this side. Zero's _will to defy his creator _is _not_. _Now _do you understand that this is _war?!_" That this was an emergency?

"You still need to tell us these things!" He needed a spotter, he needed _someone_, and Zero wasn't here.

"No," he said. "I don't need to tell anyone anything. You're not my spotter anymore, Alia, and Signas isn't my commanding officer. Even Zero doesn't have seniority anymore. You died, and I was elected ruler of the world, for my sins. I was never meant to give anyone power over me. Ever. You remember after the fall of Eurasia, Alia. You remember that the _real _order was to recall _both of us_. You remember that terror. You're terrified now, because you're a very smart child. Very brave, and it's already gotten you killed once. I would rather not have to kill you again. Don't make me kill you again. I _dislike _people attempting to control my actions. I _dislike _people trying to get in my way. I restrained myself. I restrained myself until I couldn't, not anymore. Zero… Zero still has the power to make me want to restrain myself. Until we're reunited, I'm _not safe_, Alia. You need to tell the others that. A war has started. I _hate _war. All of you need to stay out of my way."

Otherwise, he might obliterate them along with the war.

She knew how deadly he was. She was his spotter, she'd watched him kill hundreds of reploid mavericks, knowing that they were _people _to him, most of them innocent victims of a disease. If someone could slay _people_, not 'the enemy' but _innocent people_, then… She admired X, not just as a hero and a scientist (he was one of the creators of reploidkind in his own right, not just as a template for them) but as a person. She'd known that he was dangerous long before he was reduced to this. "We can't stay out of this," she told him, restraining the urge to form a buster cannon.

"Of course you won't," he said, and at least he acknowledged them that much. "I could do this by myself, but it would take too long." Be too much trouble. "And I'd kill too many people."

"Why are you doing this to us?" she demanded. "I know what you think of Colonel. How he forced the Maverick Hunters to consider Repliforce Maverick." Because of his own stupid pride. X was saying things that made them _duty-bound_ to get him under control. "You've admitted that you're insane! That makes you an Irregular!" At _best! _

"It's not that I'm trying to get you killed," he told her. "It's that I can't… try to convince people anymore. I can't lie to you, I can't try to play along. It never helped. And you are my friend, so I feel I owe you the truth, instead of silence. Instead of ignoring you, like you don't even matter."

"If you're still capable of caring about my feelings," Alia said, and spread her hands.

"You're not my enemy yet. You tried to stand in my way," but she hadn't actually gotten in his way. "You seem a decent fellow. I'd hate to kill you."

"You seem a decent fellow. I'd hate to die." Shouldn't it be Zero, saying that? "You're an irregular at best, and you're freeing Dr. Wily. You _know _that you're not rational!"

"So… it's the duty of the Hunters to get me under control?" He tilted his head. "I'm outside your chain of command, which is good, because I can't get myself under control. Zero never resigned from the Hunters."

"So you're… turning yourself in." To Zero. So the rest of them were in the clear.

"As soon as I can," he murmured, looking down at the lid of the sarcophagus. "Be quiet, Alia. If you say a word, make a gesture, if _one byte _of information is transferred from you to him that he can use…"

"I'm not going to _help _the creator of the Maverick Virus." There, right back to feeling insulted.

"Oh, trust me," X said, smiling in a way that didn't seem right to Alia, that seemed outright wrong, even if she chalked it up to X not being right himself instead of recognizing the threat display. Trust him? Because she was neither a fool nor insane that would have been the last thing she did, if she was Dr. Wily. "I'm not helping either."

Silence then, except for the sound of X burning through the sarcophagus as Alia watched him. Then, a click. "_Master X," _X said, sounding almost disgusted that Ciel's security yielded to him, a moment before a man tumbled out.

Alia was almost taken aback. He looked very little like the short, bent-up old man of the stories and the images that had survived the cataclysm, at least until she keyed up facial recognition software. She was intellectually aware that aging damaged humans, but a human getting damaged that severely, losing that much bone, and still remaining alive? Were things really that different in lost, legendary 20XX?

Unless he'd programmed his AI to look better than the reality, he was a megalomaniac, she reminded herself as he stood and dusted off the coat completely unnecessarily, shaking his head. "Why do they think that putting someone already mad in solitary confinement will _help?" _he wondered aloud, pretending to ignore them even though it was clearly for the benefit of the audience. "And I'm not even human anymore: not having to deal with idiots or my embarrassing kids is called a _vacation." _He looked up at X. "So, you're after my time travel technology, are you?"

"After you bragged about how your time imprisoned hasn't softened you up or caused you to reflect on the fact your crimes were crimes for a reason?" X wondered. "Someone's sealed off the real world from cyberspace."

Dr. Wily raised an eyebrow. "I may build that time machine after all. If they _completely _succeeded, they destroyed the Earth. If they effectively succeeded, then the question is how large the radius is. Without time travel, the best option would be to cause something to come into existence traveling at .999c and have it drop us off at a safe distance from the planet. If all they did was block off the means of access inferior minds could _almost _understand and think they were safe if they shielded them, then later, losers."

He vanished before they could react, leaving behind a voice clip to say, "By the time you make it back, the world will already be mine!" and some maniacal laughter.

"And _now _I have something to work with," X said happily.

"Try to do what he did over and over until your infinite potential system works it out?" Alia asked.

"Oh, no, he'll have anticipated that," X told her, closing his eyes. The rings snapped into position, one by one, as the crystals and patterns around them reoriented, (deliberately?) disordered thoughts replaced by smooth focus on the job at hand. "He's right, that it would take too long to brute-force it that way with only one of me, and I'm sure he threw in as many red herrings as possible."

Even if Alia had identified the key words in that statement, there still wouldn't have been anything she could do to stop it.

"So what are you planning to do?" she asked, when it was already over.

Hope nobody notices how many people are missing seventeen minutes from their timers and realizes it's because of me instead of because someone's messing with cyberspace: that would have been the honest answer, but the answer he gave her was his disappearance.

* * *

><p><em>Wily gloats and postures, declares war, programs Lightbots and Forte to kill and unleashes the virus, but he doesn't follow through, he doesn't win, because while he's willing to condemn theoretical people to death, he does things like have the explosive removed from Roll's car in "Burning Wheel"<em> _because he doesn't have the will to win if actual people he knows have to die in the process. Which means he keeps screwing around and getting people killed in the process of losing. Again, and again._

_X does have the will to go all the way. He hates it, but if he has to, he will kill people he knows, people he loves, in order to win. Inafune's Zero series concept was X becoming ruler of the world and imposing a final solution: what Wily repeatedly failed to do, because X has the will and Wily doesn't. _

_Fortunately, X has compassion, and in the actual games he realized how dangerous he was when he lost that compassion and got the heck away from temptation. Here, someone evil has attacked the world and innocent people are dying, meaning someone just hit X's berserk button/lit his fuse and trapped his safety mechanism in another dimension. He's not trying to get back to Zero because he's furious that they were separated again, he wants to get back to Zero because he doesn't trust himself anymore and Zero's the only one that he can count on to stop him, just like how he asked Zero to kill him if he ever went maverick at the end of X4. _

_An incredibly powerful reality warper (cyber-elf) with almost two centuries worth of PTSD, and enough knowledge of politics and military strategy to use that power to do maximum damage. The former Maverick Hunters are very, very right to be worried. X used to be Zero's Morality Pet/the person he checked with to make sure he was doing the right thing. I like the idea that he's learned well enough that X can rely on him to do the same now: in Inafune's concept, Zero fighting X in Zero series would have been granting X's request, that Zero stop him if he ever need to be stopped._

_As for what X just did, right now the majority of Zero's power is trapped in cyberspace, and it's established in the fic that X can access Zero's power (eg, to kick/ban Wily). And Zero isn't there to say 'wait, no.' So, a distributed computing approach to something that would have taken forever with a single reploid following a single line of attack. In addition to reploids and cyber-elves under sixty, former mavericks were also vulnerable since the system remembered their minds and how to infiltrate them. What's really worrying, though, is that as an apology and to remove the temptation to do it again and make it much harder for anyone to do it in future, X left the infinite potential system installed. _

_So, yes, good thing for the world this is noncanon. It's not a matter of 'if one city blows up, one species is extinct and another has maybe fifty-fifty odds' anymore, but they still can't absorb all that many WMD-level attacks, and look at Dynamo. With the IPS, it only takes a few bad apples willing to commit mass murder for kicks or money. I suppose it says something, that the attempt to make things right will do more damage than the selfish action... Although even the selfish action was done to save lives. _

_Chronic Hero Syndrome for you._


	9. Epilogue

_This is a thank-you fic for NHOrus, who requested something omakeish and nicely cracky post-Definition._

_I _tried _to make this a crackfic. I failed. I failed so hard._

_I may transfer this over to the mainfic: I'll consider it when/if I ever get around to writing the sequel._

* * *

><p>Priority codes were priority codes: even if X had transferred root control over Neo Arcadia to X Arc, an video call request from him tagged with the requirement that it be viewed with all present on the main screen in the family quarters still cut through the chaff of constant messages, administrative and otherwise, the Guardians received.<p>

It was X Arc who took on the task of contacting the Four Guardians to coordinate everyone's schedules and see when he could take the call, all excited that they would get to see their father again, the way he got to see Ciel again when he went with her to awaken Zero.

Perhaps he should have realized that the fact he was the one contacting everyone meant they weren't already contacting each other. Shouldn't Master X's children have wanted to expedite their reunion with their father?

When he finally got home (he couldn't rush: Master X did not rush) and saw Phantom put his head in his hand and groan when he saw him, that was when he realized something wasn't right. Fefnir's "Well, we're all here, should we get this over with?" confirmed it.

"What's wrong?" X Arc asked.

"Under my nose in Neo Arcadia all this time," Phantom said glumly. "He didn't rub it in before, but that was only because it worked to his advantage. What that means for my ability to protect the city, protect everyone… And if the _Special Operations Commander_ finds out…"

"We could have used that space station," Harpuia said, wings twitching outwards before he pulled them in again, trying to at least appear composed. As it was, they still didn't have the budget for the General responsible for aerospace to build the kind of base up there which would make it much easier to sweep areas of earth orbit for dangerous debris and allow more satellite construction. Point defense lasers could only do so much, not to mention the energy expenditure involved.

"Yes, but…" X Arc hesitated before saying, "The space station _Dr. Wily _built?" Ciel wasn't, well, she wasn't a booby trap sort of person until Weil's mechanaloids _stole her notes_, but she'd come up with some nasty ones that Phantom and the Zan'ei liked very much, since Ciel sent her designs to be used for the good of Neo Arcadia. What could a legendary scientist do? (A lot of people might say that Ciel was a legendary scientist, but it felt a little strange for him to say that about her, since she was his builder and he certainly wasn't anything like Master X or Zero, even if they'd had lots of siblings the way Ciel was building other creations. So perhaps someday she might… It felt a little like blasphemy to think that anyone might build anything like Master X and Zero.)

Harpuia looked unimpressed. "If his evil traps are anything like that _Petty Chip…_"

"A _note," _Fefnir growled, interrupting.

Was it the thought of seeing their father again that made the Guardians act, well, just a little like (X Arc didn't like to think it of them, but it was still true) newbuilts? Perhaps they were getting the complaining out of their way so it didn't mar the reunion, X Arc told himself.

"He just left us a note. No warning, no explanation, no extra codes or anything that would make it easier for us to take over what he used to do-"

"What are _you _complaining about?" Leviathan said. "Every time we tried to hand you one of the jobs X used to do, you pretended incompetence until I got stuck with it, or Harpuia did."

"You're the ones who can figure out the systems!" He was a reploid, not a hybrid robot master. "I didn't have time for programming classes and whatever!" To try to figure out what he needed to do to do the stuff X used to organize. "You were always saying 'do this, Fefnir, you didn't try to make _Phantom…"_

"Between searching for Master X and dealing with the civil unrest and borderline panic that began when news of Master X's disappearance leaked, Phantom was in no position to take on extra duties back then," Harpuia said sternly. "And the Jin'en aren't trained for police work. We may be a military dictatorship, but that doesn't mean we can act like one outside of emergencies, and the entire point was to keep our father going AWOL from looking like an emergency." Triggering even more widespread panic. "Neo Arcadia couldn't afford the appearance of martial law or some panicked newbuilt drawing on their training for convoy attacks," shoot, "dealing with an aggressive crowd. Or worse, Elf War veterans."

"I can't force people into mandatory retirement when that means disarming them!" It was one thing to have traumatized veterans keep their weapons when they were surrounded by heavily armored infantry with their own weapons, another to be toting plasma in among Neo Arcadia's fragile unarmored inhabitants and fragile infrastructure. Some of the Elf War survivors wanted to put everything connected to violence behind them, keep it as far away from them as possible, while some couldn't bear the thought of being helpless. "All of you had me taking your shell-shock cases," because the Zan'ei required a cool head, older model flyers burned too much energy for the Rekku to want to keep them around unless they were very, very good and the Meikai did underwater missions, where a part wearing out due to age could be fatal, "and do you know what it did to _them_, that Master X was gone?! And I had the people fleeing Neo Arcadia before it collapsed, and the scum preying on them! I did not have the time to learn computer science from the ground up when I had budding warlords to put down, and screw you and your newbuilts and your panicking masses of _unarmed civilians_: where did you get off saying I wasn't making public appearances when I was out with my troops twenty-two hours out of the twenty-four and _you _were the ones who wanted me to lock myself in a room studying like I had something to hide, or the Guardians were covering up that we were making secret plans for the fall of Neo Arcadia!"

"And this would be why I suggested using you to impersonate Master X," X Arc heard Phantom say quietly when the ninja appeared out of stealth next to the door behind him. "We were simply not capable of finding the time to handle our own duties, take over Master X's duties, dealing with the additional problems caused by civil unrest and appearing serene, confident and _often _enough to reassure the populace and keep the civil unrest from growing as rumors spread. There were limits to how much we could delegate without the ability to give our officers new authority to access secured systems, and transferring important duties to people less trusted by the public would have been another reminder that Master X was gone, and he would not be returning soon if ever, if we Guardians were trying to take over his duties."

"Um, excuse me?" X Arc raised his voice a little, looking past the three of them. He could see why Phantom moved away from the others. The floor was made of temperature-resistant ceramic alloy tiles. The table wasn't.

Fefnir held the sagging metal up so it would cool in the proper position. He and Leviathan could just pull out of battle mode: Harpuia had to walk over to the beam next to the balcony door, put there so he could earth the charge he'd accumulated from using his abilities when he came in from patrol.

That table had handprints on it even when X Arc first came here. He wondered if it was Master X who put it there, so there would be some visible sign and consequence of any of them losing their tempers. They wouldn't do it with humans or unarmored reploids around, and it was only the five of them here, but if they developed bad habits than what if they forgot about bystanders?

"What he told you about his reasons," Harpuia said shortly, dusting off his gloves. "Abandoning the world, and us 'for our own good,' or the world's own good. He's going to want to tell us how well we've done, thinking that's evidence his _irresponsible _decision was the right one."

Figuring out what to say to people to get them to calm down and be able to work together was much of X Arc's job, but he stood there unable to think of anything. This was _Master X_, and…

"Don't worry about it," Leviathan told him. "If this is a professional call, we'll handle it professionally. If he's making a family call, then he's X: he knows what he's getting himself into. That would be why he talked to you, not any of us, and why he's put it off this long."

"A great believer in 'expressing our honest feelings instead of unhealthy emotional repression,'" Harpuia said, clearly remembering prior conversations about that and feeling that X was about to get some karma for those times he'd tried to get Harpuia to come back out of his shell out after the start of the Elf Wars and Harpuia had had no intention of doing so. "When he was never honest with us about his feelings during the Elf Wars. Giving us platitudes and empty encouragement when he was so convinced we were all going to die or go Maverick, as though we were suddenly utterly unreliable, nothing but emotional liabilities…"

X Arc could have pointed out that it was understandable X felt that way, after losing so many people to the Maverick Wars, but the Guardians knew that. They were the ones who explained that to him to begin with.

He didn't want them to yell at Master X, but if that was what they needed to do to get it off their chests and be a family again…

"Too much honesty isn't going to get him back here, where we can yell at him properly," Leviathan pointed out to Harpuia. Both of them turned to look at Fefnir.

"Could we?" Phantom gestured at the screen.

When looking at each other showed no objections to getting this over with, either Harpuia or Leviathan must have hooked into the screen to accept the call without voice commands.

They'd replaced Master X's body in Sanctum Yggdrasil after the battle with Omega and Dr. Wily, but Master X looked just the way he had when he appeared in X Arc's mind during that battle, instead of the cyber-elf form he'd taken on Ragnarock when he didn't want his identity known. To them. He'd told Lark, but not Leviathan, and even though he'd done that because he needed Lark's body it still felt sad to X Arc.

He sat in the chair Leviathan had claimed when they were on the station, and there was a cyber-elf on his lap, the central form not visible in the mass of glowing darkness. Even the Mother Elf had a core of blue-white light under the dark power Dr. Weil inflicted on her.

Not dark power, X Arc reminded himself. Master Zero's power.

"I'm glad to see you're all safe," was what he said first.

Wouldn't he know that they were, if he'd send the message for _all _of them to activate the call, instead of just whoever could answer?

"You still have access to Neo Arcadia's records, before you ask about the city," Harpuia said.

"I would rather not," X said, looking down at his lap. "I'm not certain yet that I trust myself not to interfere, and I know that I can't trust myself once I start interfering. Using the power of this satellite to help restore the planet is still all I can do, I think."

"Should I give you a status report, then?" Harpuia said, expressionless in a way that felt just a little hostile.

"I hadn't intended to ask," X said. "I have no right to ask. I have no right to be concerned for the welfare of Neo Arcadia when I expected you to fail, and fail immediately so something could rise from the ashes before Weil returned… Or not. A military dictatorship is a dangerous thing, when the dictator has lost their conscience. I was elected. You simply took my place." The Guardians in the sense of succession, X Arc literally. "The fact you may have prevented the end of both races by preserving the city's order… Just like how my decision to kill to stop Sigma and then Weil was still choosing to kill, and therefore still wrong, regardless of my reasons. Area Zero has become an agricultural production center eclipsing Neo Arcadia. There are multiple cities now, and military bases that could, and should, become cities. Even a sizable underwater base," Leviathan, "with the water to protect it from orbital attack… You must establish self-sufficient population centers other than Neo Arcadia."

"That is what we've been doing?" Fefnir said. "Foreign Legion HQ has an outskirt area a fourth the size of Neo Arcadia's."

"It's still the military that has the authority."

"There's Dr. Ciel's mobile caravan," X Arc said, "And the Relic Hunter camps that have become more permanent," since there were ancient facilities that made good dig sites and habitations.

"_Dr. Ciel's _mobile caravan," X pointed out. "Who has authority? And who has authority over those camps?"

"Their founders." Phantom grimaced. "I've already had to develop special teams to investigate abuse of power. Enticement of labor with false promises," and worse. Once someone was out in the wastes, if you took their survival gear and maps and locked it all up, how were they supposed to leave?

"They still worship me," X said, his face just as harsh a mask as Harpuia's. "The idea that the world _should _have a single ruler, not matter how benevolent a dictator they are, instead of individuals making their voices heard and trying to make the world bend to everyone's wills… I'm sorry that I gave you the city under false pretenses, Arc," X told him, donning a smile for him now. "I hope you didn't exert yourself too much, trying to preserve it for my sake. Because it needs to be destroyed." The smile was gone already. "It needs to become just one city-state among many, with no more authority and no more _right _to any authority."

Even Fefnir's back had stiffened. He looked shocked. Leviathan's expression was a mix of comprehension and affront, the way she looked when someone told her something she didn't like, or at least in a way she didn't like, but it was true enough she couldn't argue. Phantom was trying and failing to maintain a poker face.

Harpuia was the one who said, "I refuse. Humanity's survival is still precarious enough that even if reploids can be constructed at multiple sites now, we can't lose the legal authority to manage their reproduction and genetic modifications."

"Harpuia," X said calmly, "I will make this simple for you. You will destroy the power that allows you to take the First Law you imposed on yourself and impose it on other people, when people should have the right to choose how to live their own lives, or I will use Ragnarok to destroy Neo Arcadia."

The hiss of an indrawn breath.

"You weren't even in double digits and you wanted to mutilate your mind, Harupia. Patient-doctor confidentiality is one thing, but my father wasn't going to help you figure out how to do that to yourself without running it by _your _father first. He expected me-wanted me-to refuse to let you consider such a drastic operation, but we are… you were, reploids, not humans. We don't have the same sort of latency period humans do, so a reploid parent shouldn't have _any _amount of time where they have the legal right to overrule their child's own decisions. If you choose to make your identity that of a robot master, I respect that, but Neo Arcadia was a bad idea from the beginning. Concentrating the world's remaining population in one place, where one failure point could exterminate two species? It was insane, but the situation was such that I had a choice between the insane option and the impossible ones.

"You are my children and I love you, but _no one _should have the amount of power to dictate everyone's lives that I was handed and you took from me, good intentions and necessity or no good intentions. It was Dr. Wily who thought that the world needed a ruler, Weil who thought the world needed a God. As long as the power and authority you possess remains intact, someone can take it from you. As long as Neo Arcadia remains the sole example of government on this planet, others will take it as their model. I've given you twenty years to expand your resource base, while I worked on making it possible for the planet to sustain humanity without Neo Arcadia. You can have twenty more, and when I check in on you again, I expect systems of laws that can't just be overruled because the local dictator feels like it.

"If they have to associate me and my legacy with the right to rule this planet, then that had _better _be a nontransferable right. No one has absolute authority over Neo Arcadia and the world… except Master X." Whose eyes met X Arc's: so that was why he had let X Arc rule, let him continue to shape, to enforce, the legacy and legend of Master X. "If they must worship me, then let taking my place be sacrilege. Lest the heavens rain down destruction upon them."

"…Are you _seriously_ threatening to destroy an entire city with a superweapon if you don't get your way while sitting in an armchair and stroking a small lifeform?" Leviathan demanded. "Goddammit Dad, I get your point! Stop acting like you've gone to the dark side to make us think about how much damage it would do if someone with your level of authority really did go to the dark side. We've seen the real deal."

That made a small smile appear on X's lips. "But Weil deserves to be parodied. There was a comedian in 19XX who said that he wanted to make it impossible for anyone to ever take Hitler and his ideas seriously ever again. People wanting me to favor my reploid children over humanity, those expecting me to kill my children as though that would benefit the race that was here first instead of condemn them to starvation… I asked Zero to kill me, before I went down that road, and in his absence I had to remove myself. City-states, children. While travel is still expensive enough to make transporting an army prohibitively expensive for anyone without all the resources of Neo Arcadia behind them. Let those places develop cultures and opinions and pride of their own, so they refuse to let outsiders tell them what to do. Establish a UN, use your authority and legacy to establish a force that will protect them all, unless they turn to despotism and abuse their citizens. You can have a full generation to make these changes, long enough for this to become the way it's always been and not panic people with sudden change. Or else." His green eyes glanced at Harpuia.

"I know that they're safer without a single failure point… Including myself."

"I know," X said. "But I read up on the Laws. The documentation on how my brothers and sisters dealt with them. After it was already done." Because otherwise, he might have found something there that would make him stop Harpuia despite his desire to respect his children's right to choose their own identities. "I am tired of killing. I am tired of watching people's choices be stolen from them. I won't allow my name to be turned into a weapon that goes on doing that even in my absence." He tilted his head, closing his eyes to hide that the smile didn't reach them. "But, on a happier note, presents! Also wedding gifts," Fefnir, "and preemptive wedding gifts just in case you get married before I see you again, Leviathan. They'll be airdropped the next time this station passes overhead. I hope you have fun with them!"

The call disconnected. Silence reigned for only a moment.

"Well," Fefnir said, letting out a breath. "That was much less bad than I was expecting."

"Retirement," Leviathan said longingly. "In twenty years instead of who knows when. An endgame that will let us get out of this trap," the trap called responsibility, called a world that needed them, "in only twenty years."

That seemed like a very long time to X Arc, but the Guardians were older than him, and X even older.

But… but no one had told anyone else that they loved them, or any of the things that really should happen when family had been apart for so long. He'd wanted to see them _happy, _X Arc thought, looking down at his hands.

Well, he told himself, people developed secret codes and things that only meant anything each other when they'd known each other a long time? And Master X and his children had known each other a very long time. Maybe they were all less upset than they'd been before the call started because something had just gone over his head?

And it was much better than when he was finally reunited with _his _builder. No one had mistaken anyone else for an assassin and hit them hard enough to knock them down. They hadn't even wanted to hit him, not really. So maybe next time would go better? When the Guardians didn't have to work anymore and maybe X would be feeling well enough to come visit and hug them…

And maybe make a surprise visit by using his codes to sneak in without alerting them… And maybe get mistaken for an assassin… Arc hunched his shoulders in, trying to suppress his laughter.

He wasn't sure who was first to join in.


	10. Mothers of Daughters

_A very belated giftfic for NHOrus. Wow, I'm way behind on these. I mean, I have no control over what I write anymore and have to hope my brain is in an accommodating mood, but ten?! Hoping that I'll be in a less brain-frying situation before the end of June, though._

* * *

><p>The Mother Elf wasn't exactly a judge of human appearances. Compared to the range in shapes and colors available to reploids, humans tended to look basically alike. If it weren't for facial recognition software, the way humans didn't wear the same colors of clothing from one day to the next unless it was a uniform (which obviously wouldn't be any help telling two humans apart) would have caused some serious problems.<p>

So Aurora Elpis had no idea to what extent Ciel, a biological descendant of her creator, looked like that creator. Yes, they looked alike from the viewpoint of a member of a different species, but did they look similar by human standards or not?

Ciel looked more like Arciel than she looked like Weil, but was that because Arciel's descendants had removed Weil's genes from their bloodline or was it because Ciel and Arciel shared the same physical build type while Weil was a different sex?

Arciel's hair was light brown, not blonde, so according to what reploids looked for to tell individuals apart, Ciel looked more like Omega than she did Arciel. Since Aurora was inside Omega's body, for now, that meant she looked like her… something-niece?

The fact Omega's armor was partially red while Ciel's skin was partially red with sunburn didn't quite help. Omega was Grandfather's creation, so looking like him would make Ciel like Grandfather, not like Arciel.

Changing Omega's body, the body Aurora currently inhabited, so it wasn't recognizable as Omega or Zero would make Aurora look less like Ciel, then. The white labcoat, however?

Aurora wasn't sure if she wanted her… grand-niece? To look like her mother. Family was, was dangerous.

Her father, Weil, went mad and… Her mind flinched back from thinking about what he'd done to and with her.

Her grandfather had seemed kind. Well, maybe not seemed kind. Seemed like family. Seemed like a scientist, and therefore like Arciel and X, even if Weil was also a scientist. Seemed like Arciel when she was cranky and not making an effort to not strike out at people.

Everyone had just assumed that Ciel was the one who was going to check Aurora over and work on her. There weren't many other scientists of Ciel's caliber, and she was already briefed on what was going on. Fefnir and his family weren't going to spread truths around unnecessarily, not when that was so much of what produced Weil's madness.

Aurora was afraid. Of Ciel.

Even if she was in control now and not Omega, to be in this body, in the grasp of a scientist…

Family wasn't a comfort, not the way Fefnir assumed. Family was dangerous. She'd thought that grandfather wasn't going to hurt her, even if he wasn't interested in helping X's family, but… dangerous.

She wished this worktable was against a wall, so she could sit with her back to it instead of having to watch Ciel walk all around it, checking various readouts. The cyber-elf lazily circling Ciel might have felt reassuring – one of her own kind – if it weren't for the war. When cyber-elves, when _she _drove their reploid partners mad, and it was no longer a good sign, to see someone with a cyber-elf friend.

At least it was a sign that Ciel was _in _danger, and not dangerous.

At least Ciel didn't seem to notice that Aurora was nervous. If she stopped what she was doing to reassure the Mother Elf, this would take longer.

Humming.

That was like Arciel, and like Grandfather.

Puttering around. If she thought of it that way instead of a very intelligent shark mechaniloid circling, then it was like home, like before.

"Um," said the superscientist who had found a way to imprison Grandfather. One that still seemed to be working.

"Yes?" Aurora responded, after a pause to see if Ciel would continue. And another few seconds while Aurora decided whether or not responding was the best course, but from the way Ciel's hands were fidgeting, this wasn't something that would be forgotten about that easily.

"I shouldn't ask you about anything that happened," Ciel clearly knew, looking to the side guiltily. "But we're related so, if there's anything else I can do to help – I mean of course," she said, eyes meeting Aurora's. Of course she'd help a member of her family. Or would she help anyone? "My mother died when I was four, so I was raised in the creche. There was a problem with her genes, so she became a geneticist to try to fix it but she couldn't do it fast enough. It wasn't because of the genemods, except that she had two copies of the same chromosome and there's a lot of human upgrades that are great if you have one copy of them, but if you have two copies and don't have a copy of the baseline gene without the upgrade, then your body doesn't have the programming to do what the original gene was supposed to do. That's part of why it's really important for humans to have as many different genes as possible, but, um…. I'm sorry," she apologized. "I'm wandering off-topic again. Reploid and cyber-elf design are different, because if you put two different sets of programming into a reploid you'll end up with two reploids in the same body, which would be mean, and a cyber-elf probably wouldn't be viable. But, um, most of my family's programming – genes – comes from Arciel, so…" She looked embarrassed, but it was hard to tell if her face was flushed or not, under the sunburn.

"…You want to know what Arciel was like so you'll know how you will turn out?" Oh, Aurora realized, remembering what happened to her mother.

Maybe Ciel really was someone she should be scared _for_.

"No." That wasn't it. "My mother. If she lived longer. What was Arciel like when she was your mother…" Ciel's hands rose up to cover her cheeks. "I'm so sorry! I shouldn't remind you of things, or make you think of them!"

It felt like it should have taken longer for Ciel to run out of the lab, with all the valuable equipment arranged throughout the room, but it seemed to take her only an instant to clear the doorway.

The two cyber-elves left behind stared after her.

* * *

><p>"It's changed," he said, looking around them in a way that might have seemed casual if it weren't for the charged buster. The armor he was wearing wasn't his normal armor either, but she could feel the energies of the buster.<p>

"You've been here before?" she asked, circling his head.

X raised a hand to block her path, but not abruptly. "I have other visual sensors, but this place is… strange. Try not to fly right in front of my eyes while we're here, please. I'm worried I might not be able to protect you."

Well, of course he was, she thought. Arciel and Weil worried about her because they made her, so they were her parents. They said that X was the parent of _lots _of people, so of course he was going to worry.

She ignored the statement of the obvious, except it reminded her not to float too far away.

There were glowy things, but _different _glowy things. Red and purple and black.

"I _think_ I have been here before," he told her, answering her question even if he was still questioning this place and his memories. "It might just be that there was a mass of the virus during the Eurasia Incident and the clean-up, but losing Sigma…" X shook his head to clear his thoughts and scanned the area again. "Let's get back to the real world first," he said lightly, turning back to her. "We should make sure that we _can _get back, before we do anything else. Otherwise, they'll be worried about us."

At the time, she thought he was just talking about her parents worrying about her, but with Zero sealed and Axl not-quite-trusted because of Lumine and Redips both turning traitor? Yes, everyone would be _very _worried if the only immune person vanished with something based on Zero and couldn't get back.

X stiffened a fraction of an instant before she heard the voice. "Leaving so soon?"

X turned slowly, and his eyes narrowed. "Ah," he said, and closed his eyes for a moment. When they reopened they seemed brighter, (mask donned, she knew now) and he smiled at her. "Aurora, I'd like you to meet your grandfather."

The old man sputtered. "Grandfather?" he demanded.

"She _is_ code of Zero's code," X nudged, as though he was reminding the old man with his wings of hair of something he really _should _know already.

"This knockoff, my granddaughter?" the scientist fumed, putting gnarled hands on hips hidden by a labcoat.

"Isn't she?" X asked. His voice seemed light and mild, but there was something in it that reminded Aurora of Arciel when she was _surrounded by idiots_, even if X was hoping that this person would stop being stupid if pushed into thinking while Arciel would have gone right to the cutting words. "You had a great many children, many of them adopted, and I'm told you were fond of all of them in your own way. I'd have thought that you'd be happy to finally meet your first grandchild."

The old man's (her grandfather's?) eyes narrowed. "I know what you're doing," he growled.

"Am I wrong?" X asked.

The android smiled. The old man grumbled and folded his arms, finally looking away and letting out an extremely disgruntled sigh, conceding the point.

X touched the charged buster shot he was holding with his other hand. It absorbed the energy, silencing the whine of the held charge. He separated his hands again.

A grey eyebrow rose, eyeing the megabuster X had just turned back into a hand. "I should take her with me, then. Upgrade her into something less pathetic and set her up to become Queen of the World."

"I think you mean what's left of it…" X said, a corner of his mouth turning up. "Zero hasn't even gotten to meet her yet. For a parent to have to… fight their children is a very painful thing." He was smiling now, but it was a sad one. "I would know. Is that really what you wanted for Zero?

If X had disarmed, things must be safe now. Aurora was used to people talking about the wars. Her parents had told her not to listen since they didn't want her to feel bad about not being ready yet, so she was dutifully mostly tuning the conversation out, since they were talking about fighting.

She could feel that both of them were watching her, and since she had supervision she could explore a bit. X would tell her if she went too far.

"He's fought his brothers cheerfully enough."

"You know it's not the same thing," X said, with that same tone of 'You know I'm right. You know this already.' No triumph or mockery in it, just a patient reminder.

"Children and everyone else? It's true, but if _you _knew it, why are you killing reploids for humans?"

"I fight for everyone's sake," X said calmly. "Everyone includes reploids. I have all my family's data on the situation in 20XX, but in 21XX, it was never humans against reploids. Perhaps it would have been, if you hadn't created that virus. Perhaps I would have had to face the consequences of releasing plans that made sure that every reploid built in the first five years, when the reploid population was small enough to be controllable, had a megabuster or other weapon. My father wanted me to be able to defend myself, even if that meant I posed a threat to the world. I wanted the same for my children, and I was willing to accept the consequences. But the virus… I couldn't give them a weapon to defend against it. So, for their sakes, I had to become that weapon."

"Did you hear that, knockoff?" The old man laughed. "You're a weapon to him. Just like your father."

Back then, she had no idea what it meant, to be a weapon.

Back then, she'd spread her wings proudly, showing off her ability to generate and control energy. "I'm the _best_. I'm going to beat the virus and no one will fight anymore." She'd fix all the mavericks and nobody else would dare.

"Aaargh. The knockoff thinks she's _dynamite._" Her grandfather's palm hit his forehead. "The weapon to end all wars, now… The idiots who made you must be as delusional as Alfred Nobel. They won't let you stop fighting. There will always be something they want you to kill." A snort. "Telling you that you can defeat my virus…"

"She doesn't need to defeat your virus," X said, and that made her turn towards him and flicker in place of blinking. "Your granddaughter is a child: I don't want her to have to fight Zero. Zero needs her help."

"My creation doesn't need the help of some knockoff, even if it is based on my technology."

"You must know," X said sadly. "How much it hurts Zero to-"

"It doesn't," he interrupted. "I made sure of it."

Once again, Aurora's younger self had lost track of what they were talking about, but hadn't really cared. It was just grown-ups talking grown-up things that would take very long, boring explanations for her to understand. Very boring, especially when there was virus right there.

Before she could get close enough to try to cure it, X's hands were around her, yanking her back. She squeaked. "Careful now," he said.

"It's only a little virus! I can do that all by myself!"

"That doesn't mean you should."

"You're admitting she shouldn't cure my virus?" Grandfather interrupted.

"You need to be careful, Aurora," X told her, lifting her up to his eyes and seemingly ignoring the old man. "A lot of people are counting on you. If you can cure the mavericks, then so many people won't have to die. It's one thing to risk your own life, but think of how many people need your help. Including your father."

"Ah, so you do want her to destroy the virus within Zero. Haven't you figured it out yet? Zero _is _the virus! He trusts you, the fool, and you're going to kill him while he sleeps!"

"No," X said, lowering Aurora. "I trust Zero to win against the virus within him. What I'm afraid of is that he'll kill himself instead of change himself."

Apparently-grandfather glared, but it wasn't really a scary glare. Maybe Aurora was just used to her mother glaring at stupid people.

"No," X said, as though he was agreeing even though he'd said the word no. "That wouldn't be for the best. I'm glad you still love him, no matter what you think of his life choices."

"It's all _your _fault. You're the one who tampered with his systems in the first place!"

She felt a slight shudder in X's hands, even if his voice remained calm as he said, "Perhaps." _That _was like dad, not Zero but actual-dad, who was jittery sometimes but rarely shouted at people or acted jittery because mother would pick up that he was being jittery and start shouting at people well before he had to do more than bite his lip. So he was able to be good cop and try to calm mother down instead of feeling like he was the reason there was shouting or having people be angry at him. Mother enjoyed being angry, but it bothered dad. Everyone said that X was a really nice person, so he probably didn't show that he was angry or upset much either.

Back then, she'd wondered if Zero was like mother, only with stabbing mavericks instead of yelling at people, before X had to get upset enough to be vicious, and thought that Zero was asleep instead of there to yell at people.

She hadn't thought of either of them in terms of fragility. Not when X was a hero and dad was dad and said no to mother a lot, which was a very scary thing to do. They were adults, so she'd thought patient, and the impatient people beat them to acting angry.

Patient. Not brittle.

No. X was worn down, worn thin, but not brittle even now. Or maybe he was, but that was why he'd withdrawn from Neo Arcadia. X considered himself already broken, but no.

She'd seen what happened to her… to Weil. That was not X, that would never be X.

"You're just being mean!" she said back then, slipping out of X's hands to dash in front of the man's face, not hitting him but coming close enough fast enough to cause a reflexive flinch before darting away again. "Don't be mean," she said, straightening out her wings (once again not quite hitting him). "We're doing an important experiment." Go be silly and mean somewhere else, science deserves better.

It drew a laugh from X, or at least a chuckle, kind and fond. People had very different laughs: with X it was almost impossible to think that he was laughing at you, or being unkind, even if from the grandfather's glower he was trying. "You take after your mother," he told Aurora first, so she didn't think he was laughing because of anything embarrassing. "You should… It would be interesting if you met Aurora's mother, you have a lot in common."

"I, the great…" he paused. "_I _have anything in common with a maker of knockoffs?"

"Grumpy labcoat person," Aurora said, and with the matter settled landed on his head, in between the hair tufts.

X's eyes widened slightly before he ducked his head and covered his mouth, trying very hard not to laugh and succeeding in not making a sound, even if it was very obvious that he was laughing inside.

"Get off, you damn firefly!" he said, swiping at her with an open hand. Not hard, but she lifted up to avoid it.

"I'm not going to burn it, I know how not to burn things!"

"Fireflies don't… Fireflies didn't set things on fire, Aurora," X told her. "Personal space."

She tilted. "Are grandfathers not like parents?"

X made a thoughtful sound. "That depends on the grandfathers. And the parents."

"He's a grumpy labcoat person." So how not like a parent could he be?

There was an incoherent growl of outrage.

"Oh, she's not saying you're not dangerous. A parent isn't, well, a parent shouldn't be dangerous to their children," X said, smile becoming a little sad again, which drew the grandfather's attention back towards him. "Your granddaughter shouldn't have to be afraid of you."

"That's what you want, trying to get me to tolerate her existence even if she's a knockoff that exists because of Zero letting himself be experimented on by incompetents. If you hadn't…" he growled.

"Even if installing that chip into Zero to help him think and speak did mess up his systems, you existed. If you were able to repair and rebuild him, then I know you could have contacted him, fixed his software so he didn't have to suffer like this."

"He hasn't suffered anything! Trying to play on how much I care for my creations at the same time you _insult _me by implying that Zero is suffering because of my programming, as though I didn't make damn sure that he wouldn't…"

Like mother's reaction when people wanted her to make other versions of Aurora for external testing, or implied that this was a thing she'd be willing to do. Or let them do. Ever. When that would almost certainly end in mavericks trying to get their hands on mother's creations and trying to do things with them or testing-to-destruction. There was a long boring time when Aurora had to stay in the case, or not even think about trying to do things, since mother had managed to make an Aurora but wasn't quite sure how to make one stay alive yet.

"Oh!" Parents worrying! "If you're not letting me do anything, we need to get back! Bye grandfather!"

"Right," X agreed. "We shouldn't worry your parents."

Hmph, went the grumpy labcoat person. "And don't come back. You, anyway." He told X. "If either of you show yourselves around here again, I'll have something waiting for you, and only one of you will like it." He crossed his arms and vanished.

"Your parents are going to be very angry with me," X said regretfully, looking at where the man had stood, "But Aurora, do _you_ think it's worth making an attempt to cure the virus now?"

"I can do it!" she said. "Mother thinks I can, otherwise she wouldn't even have let me start testing for it! She's only saying I might not be good enough because parents are stupid when they're worried!" That wasn't exactly what Dad said after Mother ordering Aurora not to even try anything because she might be weak and pathetic enough to die instead of being even good enough to do what she was _for_ made Aurora's frequencies get all slow and her energy signature get all weird, but that was because Dad was too nice to say mean things. He'd only barely raised his voice at Mother to make her stop yelling at Aurora. Well, he'd tried to say things to make Mother stop a few times, but she'd ignored him until he raised his voice and then flinched as though he'd expected Mother to start yelling at him now, and that made Mother look at him and Aurora and realize that she was hurting them.

Mother couldn't stand it when she did that any more than Dad could stand confrontations, so she ran away then and Dad had to calm Aurora down and then go find mother.

"It's much better if we do it now," Aurora said. "That well it will be done and we can go back and they can stop worrying because it will be over." They wouldn't have to fend off people demanding Aurora do something that might kill her _yesterday_. It really, really upset Dad and Mother only enjoyed yelling at people to make them stop bothering Dad and Aurora so much. There were people that even Mother couldn't stop by yelling, though, if they gave orders.

Mother contacted X, though, and after that the stupid people went away.

"Maybe we can tell them that we just _had _to fix it all, though? To get out?" Aurora asked hopefully. "Please?" Lying was bad, but Aurora really wished she was better at it.

"Well," X said, glancing at her but then looking back at where the grandfather was, looking a little concerned. "I can certainly say honestly that it would be safer to do it now than the alternative…"

* * *

><p>X could say she'd been innocent and carefree back then (as well as a child, without the kind of preset social strategy set humans or reploids had, trying to figure things out from scratch) all he liked, but she still called herself blind. Self-centered.<p>

Here she was, flinching back, as afraid as her father made her after he broke, and tried to make the world a place where everyone had to exist with… not even fear. With the certainty of pain.

Ciel ran away because she was afraid of hurting Aurora with her words, because she was afraid she didn't know how to not hurt people, and the only way to stop bringing up memories might be to not be there.

Until he announced his intention to kill them all (except her), she'd thought that grandfather was safe because he was like her mother.

Now, she knew that her mother had been terrified that _she _wasn't safe, not for any of them, not for the world, because Arciel was made to be another Dr. Wily.

An attempt to harness that genius, make a version that was safe, keep it from destroying the world. The way Aurora was an attempt to harness Zero's power.

Knock-offs. Imitations, meant to oppose the originals. Did Arciel consider herself just as much a pale shadow of the original as Aurora did?

If X hadn't pointed out that she was Dr. Wily's granddaughter (twice over, she knew now), if he hadn't encouraged her to act immediately and anchored her while she destroyed the virus and much of the power Dr. Wily could draw on with it? She would have been captured, too pathetic to escape or fight him off for all her power. She would have ended up like Lumine, used as the figurehead of another war.

The way her father used her.

Or perhaps grandfather would have tried to use her mother instead. Like Dr. Cossack. Blame the human for something that twisted and used reploids, to fan the fading embers of the Maverick Wars.

She thought that grandfather was safe, even if he hadn't intervened to save her from father. Just let father do what he wanted with that technology and Omega, the way he'd let Sigma ravage the world.

"Are you alright?" asked the other cyber-elf, turning in midair.

"You should go with her," Aurora said.

"Is thinking about your creators that painful?" the cyber-elf asked, and then shrunk quickly when Arciel turned the gaze of Omega's optics away from the door to stare at it.

It wasn't that a cyber-elf should be too afraid to talk to her. Perhaps it was just that she was unused to being spoken to at all, but for some reason that hesitance surprised her. Or was it that the question was asked at all?

"You're Ciel's friend." That was why the cyber-elf was asking, right. So it could reassure Ciel that, "She didn't upset me."

The cyber-elf tilted its glowing body. "If she didn't, then what did?"

She'd gotten out of the habit of lying about her feelings, after so long with X. It never worked and giving an honest answer got the conversation over with faster. "Mother, Father, Grandfather. The legacies we're trapped in. X's children are heroic, but I have madmen on both sides of my family. Am I supposed to tell Ciel that she's like Mother when that means like Grandfather?"

"You think that your mother was like Dr. Wily?"

That was common knowledge? Well, if this cyber-elf was Ciel's companion, then she might be cleared for this, or have pieced it together during what happened. "That was why I thought he wouldn't hurt me. The way Mother wouldn't have. Even if Father did, when I thought he never would. Zero had to seal himself away, to keep himself from being a threat to the world. I was sealed away, X thought it was for the best, and now the young one and Fefnir ask me to help, but Fefnir is too kind and the young one is Ciel's creation. So is he from our family line, and doomed to, to hurt the world no matter what he wants, instead of someone with X's infinite potential? Someone who might be right when he says that I can help?"

Why was she inflicting this on a cyber-elf? Letting them see that their progenitor was pathetic like this? There was an obvious solution: ask Leviathan and Harpuia. She didn't know Phantom as well as the two of them, but she knew the twins would never sugar-coat their opinion of anyone.

Lie to them in order to use or destroy them, yes, but if that was what they thought she deserved…

Staring at the wall, she said "Father didn't capture mother, even though he could have. She came to speak to him, to try to get through to him, and he, he was insane, he said that she wasn't capable of being good, of helping him the way she'd promised or helping anyone. That she was evil, just like X," that was proof of his insanity, even if the history the cyber-elf had to know wasn't proof enough. X might be terrifying, after the war stripped every bit of real softness from him, damaged his ability to restrain his will when other people got in the way, but evil? Never. That made him even more terrifying, when he guarded her, to feel that righteous strength, not cold but _absolute_, and know she deserved for it to crush her. He had so little mercy left, she knew, and she didn't deserve to have it wasted on her.

"What do you think?" the cyber-elf asked quietly. "About," a fraction of a second's pause, "Dr. Arciel?"

"If Mother was evil, she wouldn't have put herself in danger, she would have fought him. If Mother was evil, she would have stayed alive and maybe rescued me. If she was evil, she might be here now… But if she was evil, she wouldn't have saved me any more than Grandfather did. I should have known he wasn't a good person from the way he just watched."

"I suppose that's true," the cyber-elf said. "Dr. Light gave X armors. He even exceeded his programming to give one to Zero, and Dr. Wily brought Zero back from the dead even when Zero was fighting his plan and protecting X. No matter what their objective was supposed to be, only a very evil person would have just stood by and let her daughter suffer during the Elf Wars."

Aurora turned Omega's head to look directly at the cyber-elf.

"Even Dr. Wily did all of this to protect his child, and all _I _am is the fear of what my children might do to other people. I knew that Weil could, _would _use you to override my programming and turn me into another Baby Elf, or worse, but that doesn't excuse the fact that I didn't even try to help you. I can't even claim it was because it took everything I had to keep our flesh-and-blood daughter alive, when she was in protective custody and hidden away as safely as anyone possibly could have been, to help the war effort with her work.

"Even Dr. Wily kept his son alive and well no matter what, so I really can't blame some family curse, can I? The evil of abandoning you isn't something that I inherited. It's entirely my own."

"Mother," Aurora realized, and Omega's hand darted out with all the swiftness and accuracy of a warrior god, Aurora's will channeled through it.

"Mother," she whispered, holding the small light up to her eyes.

* * *

><p><em>Alfred Nobel (as in the Nobel Prize) thought that his invention, dynamite, was such a terrible weapon that no one would fight wars anymore.<em>

_Yeeeeeeeah._

_There were references to X's first meeting with WilyAI when he wasn't thinly disguised as a reploid in Definition, and also the revelation re. Passy being the product of Arciel's awareness that she was genetically based on Dr. Wily and she and her descendants were very dangerous because of it. Look at what the virus did to the world... That was done to continue the themes of the fic, but it could have used following up on._


End file.
